Here’s a belated blogpost, welcoming Joey to Coop‘s group in RelEng.
When I introduced Joey on 23rd May, I started by asking “What has 1,797 files, and now runs about twice as slow compared to a year ago“?
Mozilla’s makefiles are used daily by every developer every day, and by RelEng continuous integration machines literally thousands of times every day. Joey will be focused on making these Makefiles more efficient, easier to understand, easier to *safely* change, as well as make them build faster. All super important. Oh, and don’t break anything in the process! 🙂 Given how much this impacts RelEng infrastructure, and all the really exciting work on Makefiles that Joey has done in a previous life, we’re really excited to have Joey join our group and turn his quiet laser focus here.
Joey will be another remote RelEng person – working from New York state – but you can find him in irc.mozilla.org in the #build channel as “joey”. Stop by and say “hi”, but please be patient. To start with, Joey is wading through *tons* of stuff with Ted and Kyle to learn his way around our Makefiles. Ted and Kyle know this stuff more then most anyone, I think. They have already done tons of work here over the years, wrangling this large complex can of worms, and keeping things working along while also at the same time dealing lots of other stuff on their plates. Every time I look into these Makefiles “to make a quick simple change”, I find myself going away thinking I need to buy Ted and Kyle a beer for all their hard work so far.
UPDATE: (Joey’s working on setting up a blog, and getting it added to planet. I’ll link to it once its up and running.) Joey’s blog is here. joduinn 05aug2011
Lovely! Is de-recursifying the makefiles, even partially, part of the plan? In incremental rebuilds it seems like a decent fraction of the time is taken up by recursing into all those directories.
hi njn;
Yes, de-recursifying the makefiles is one of the options on the table. Whatever it takes to make building faster. Measuring helps figure out where to focus attention first. Did you see https://www.releasemechanix.com/2011/03/11/where-does-time-go-when-you-build/ ?
John.
Have the numbers gone up or is 1979 a typo for 1797? (It’s the sort of typo that I make when typing Bugzilla bug numbers in by hand…)
hi Neil;
Duh – that was a typo. Thanks for spotting it – I’ve now fixed it. The correct number is 1,797… which of course is what Joey is working to detangle and streamline, so with any luck this should get much smaller.
tc
John.
[…] Makefile story. John rightly gave up waiting for me to blog about Joey starting, and has written a post of his own explaining in more depth why Joey’s work is important. I’ll just add that we’ve done a lot of work recently in RelEng trying to identify long […]
[…] John O’Duinn welcomed Joey to Mozilla with the following note last spring: Mozilla’s makefiles are used daily by every developer every day, and by RelEng continuous integration machines literally thousands of times every day. Joey will be focused on making these Makefiles more efficient, easier to understand, easier to safely change, as well as make them build faster. All super important. Oh, and don’t break anything in the process! […]