Mozilla

Here’s your mid-year report from the offices, basements, and caverns of BMO! Performance This year we’re spending a lot of time on performance. As nearly everyone knows, Bugzilla’s an old Perl app from the early days of the Web, written way before all the technologies, processes, and standards of today were even dreamt of. Furthermore, Bugzilla (including BMO) has a very flexible extension framework, which makes broad optimizations difficult, since extensions can modify data at many points during the loading and transforming of data....

A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was no alternative. Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change....

Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org. We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code. Getting over there was no small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things....

2013 was a pretty big year for BMO! I covered a bit in my last post on BMO, but I want to sum up just some of the things that the team accomplished in 2013 as well as to give you a preview of a few things to come. We push updates to BMO generally on a weekly basis. The changelog for each push is posted to glob’s blog and linked to from Twitter (@globau) and from BMO’s discussion forum, mozilla....

I went about the seemingly simple task of sharing a directory in OS X with an Ubuntu VMware box so that I could code in my main desktop and run under Linux. The simple sharing dialog is of course only the beginning of the work; after that, I needed to refresh VMware tools, since I had done several kernel upgrades. Well that turned into a few hours of flailing at a command line....

There’s been a lot of interest in improving Mozilla’s code-review process lately, so in that vein the BMO team has set up a ReviewBoard instance at https://reviewboard.allizom.org for testing and evaluation. ReviewBoard is a lot more useful than Splinter, so I suggest you try it out. One of the features I think will be most adored is proper interdiff support, made possible by the fact that ReviewBoard knows about the repo you’re working in....

A lot of people probably don’t know that I manage the team behind BMO, that is, bugzilla.mozilla.org, Mozilla’s Bugzilla installation. Work on BMO is continuous and incremental, and even really useful features often take a while to percolate through the community, so I thought I’d try to draw attention to some recent improvements that should get you pumped to open a Bugzilla tab. Suggested Reviewers A really exciting, and long-awaited, feature is suggested reviewers....

Autophone is an automated system that executes Python test scripts on real user hardware, that is, actual phones. It’s been an active project for about a year now, and we’ve learned a lot about the difficulties of performing automated performance measurements on hardware that was never intended for automation. I’m documenting this story for posterity, since it has been an interesting, if often frustrating, experience. If you want to follow along, the source is on github....

I bet that the moment most people decide they actually do like git is when they start using ‘rebase’ regularly. I definitely do not completely understand the git model, but rebase shows that there is some seriously cool stuff going on. Anyway, I’ve come upon a rebasing dilemma. The reasons for not rebasing a public repo are clear, but pushing to a remote origin (e.g. github) is also a form of backup....

Keeping wiki pages up to date is a hard problem, but recently we found out that people were having trouble finding out what projects we were working on. Obviously we can’t help people with their problems if they can’t figure out what we do, so I spent some time today updating the A-Team’s Project Central. All the projects we are working on are there, along with owners’ IRC nicks and links to project pages and/or docs....