Last week, we finally moved the 1.8 nightlies over to running on the release automation machines. If we’ve done our homework right, no-one noticed anything! And seriously, if you do notice something wrong with the mozilla1.8 / FF2.0.0.x nightlies, or have any questions, please update bug#417147, and/or contact Rob, myself or anyone on build@m.o.

This is a really big deal for us, and has taken many months of preparation and homework to get to here. Out of paranoia, we’ve been generating two complete sets of nightlies in parallel; one set on the traditional nightly machines, one set on the release automation machines. And we’ve done this for each of the 3 supported o.s. since 15feb2008. If all goes well, we’ll power down the old build machines soon in bug#422298.

Thats a lot of homework – for no visible gain, so why bother – why is this so important to us? To me, this feels like our third major automation milestone since we started the build automation rollout:

• 1st milestone was shipping FF2.0.0.7 using release automation
• 2nd milestone was shipping FF3.0beta2 using release automation
• This 3rd milestone reduces the number of clusters of “similar-but-not-quite-identical” build machines we have to maintain, and reduces some of the weird code paths we support. Both of these help us by reducing the overall complexity of the remaining systems… which speeds up our future code cleanup.
• Our next (4th) milestone is to do the same with the 1.9/trunk nightlies (bug#421411) which will brings similar improvements.

Stay tuned…