Mozilla released Firefox3.0rc2 on Wednesday 04-jun-2008, at 16:25PST. From “Dev says go” to “release is now available to public” was just under 7days (6d 22h 25m) wall-clock time, of which Build&Release took almost 2.5 days (2d 11h 06m).

18:50 28may: Dev says “go” for FF30rc3
02:16 29may: FF3.0rc2build1 builds started
06:08 29may: FF3.0rc2build1 mac builds handed to QA
14:59 29may: FF3.0rc2build1 linux builds handed to QA
17:11 29may: FF30rc2build1 signed-win32 builds handed to QA
??:?? ??may: respin declared for mac only.
??:?? ??may: FF3.0rc2build2 mac-only builds started
11:18 30may: FF3.0rc2build2 mac builds handed to QA
11:54 30may: FF3.0rc2buid2 update snippets available on betatest update channel
07:33 04jun: Dev & QA says “go” for Release; Build already completed final signing, bouncer entries
07:33 04jun: mirror replication started
11:00 04jun: mirror absorption good for testing to start on releasetest channel
13:13 04jun: QA completes testing releasetest.
14:57 04jun: website changes finalized and visible. Build given “go” to make updates snippets live.
15:43 04jun: update snippets available on live update channel
16:25 04jun: release announced

Notes:

1) Firefox3.0rc2 was the last full-build-across-all-platforms release we did in the run up to the release of FF3.0.0. The formal FF3.0 release was rc3. However, as rc3 required a rebuild of mac only, with no new linux/win32 builds, it didnt make any sense to measure wallclock times on just that!

2) Our blow-by-blow scribbles are public, so the curious can read about it, warts and all, here. Those Build Notes also link to our tracking bug#426307.

3) I couldn’t find the times at which the mac-only respin was declared, or at which the mac-only respin builds started, so I calculated the times as worst-case for RelEng. If anyone has those times, could you please let me know?
4) There were some complications during this release caused by problems with netapp hardware failures while doing the release. For the curious, the details are in bug#435134. This required RelEng and IT to do some nice cross-group coordinated juggling, to avoid delaying the release.
take care
John.