1st June 2010 will be a big day for RelEng. In addition to the FF3.6.4 and FF3.5.10 releases, we’ll also finally be able to power off the FF3.0 infrastructure. The CVS-based machines listed in bug#554226 have been supported in production for over 3.5 years, so we’ll be sad (and happy!) to see them go.

After all those years, its quite possible that people are relying on those machines in ways we do not even know about. Hence this widespread notice. If you have any reasons these Firefox 3.0 machines should be left running, please let us know by commenting in bug#554226. After we power off these machines, they can be restored from tape backup if needed, but doing that is non-trivial, so should only be considered an extreme last resort.

What will change:
• No FF3.0.x incremental/depend/hourly builds will be produced.
• No FF3.0.x clobber/nightly builds will be produced.
• No FF3.0.x release builds will be produced.
• The FF3.0 waterfall page will be removed from tinderbox. Specifically, this page http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Firefox3.0 will go away as it will be empty.

What will *not* change:
• Existing FF3.0.x builds would still be available for download from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/
• Existing update offers would still be available. For example:
  • FF3.0.14 users can still update to FF3.0.19.
  • FF3.0.19 users can still update to latest FF3.6.x release (which is FF3.6.3 as of this writing).
• Newly revised major update offers, like from FF3.0.19 -> a future FF3.6.9 release, could still be produced as needed (because these are produced on the FF3.6.x infrastructure, not on the powered off FF3.0 infrastructure.)
• Any mozilla-1.9.0 machines which are not Firefox specific should continue to run as usual.

Why do this:
• Reuse some of these machines over to production pool-of-slaves or try
  pool-of-slaves, where there is more demand
• Reduce manual support workload and systems complexity for RelEng and IT.
• Allows us speed up making changes to infrastructure code, as there’s now no longer a need to special-case and retest FF3.0 specific situations. As soon as we power off the Thunderbird2.0 machines, we can stop having to support both cvs *and* Mercurial throughout build automation.
• For the curious, Mozilla’s 6month End-of-Life support policy can be seen here (https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseRoadmap) and is also mentioned on the Firefox “all-older” download page here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

If you have any reasons that these Firefox3.0 machines should continue running, please comment in bug#554226. Now.

Yes, really.

Now.

Thanks
John.