It took 34 hours to produce Firefox3.0beta1 rc1.

Those 34 hours were frantic. Two people, tag teaming day & night, working with the nervous tension of knowing that a single one character typo could invalidate the entire build, and force us to start all over again. Those 34 hours only got us as far as producing unsigned builds on each platform – roughly 1/3 of the overall Build work needed to do a release – before we hit a problem. A typo. At the beginning of it all, one person typed PDT into one computer, while the other person typed PST into another computer. That typo meant rc1 did not include a last minute important bugfix. So, we scrapped rc1 and started all over again, building rc2. (I note that the D and S are even next to each other on the keyboard [sigh!]. And if it wasnt for the timezone change last week, it would have not mattered either[sigh! sigh!])

To put that 34 hours in perspective, Build took 37 hours to do everything needed for the complete FF2.0.0.9 release… and most of that was actually just watching the automation chugging along. Active human work was down to a handful of hours for signing, bouncer/mirror updates, and a little nervous manual rechecking of the automated checks, just to be sure, to be sure.

Why the night and day difference?

We’ve been focusing on automation for the FF2.0.0.x branch over the last few months, shipping FF2.0.0.7, FF2.0.0.8 and FF2.0.0.9 each time with automation improved from the previous release. Sadly, none of this automation work is live on trunk yet. All the trunk releases, like the alphas, and now this FF3.0beta1, are done the old fashioned way. By hand. One command at a time.

This week was a stark reminder of what things used to be like, and gave perspective on how much we’ve accomplished so far this year.