In case you missed it, coop did an important post on some upcoming directory restructuring work about to happen on ftp.mozilla.org. If you have any concerns/questions, please comment in bug#449607

Depending on release schedules, next week coop plans to change the directory structure of builds on ftp.m.o from using a shorter BuildID (YYYY-MM-DD-HH) to using our “new” full BuildID (YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-ss).

This change means a few important things:
* if you look at the buildid in your Firefox, you would be able to programatically create the full path to where that specific build can be downloaded from ftp.m.o.
* RelEng can programatically create the full path to where the build can be uploaded onto ftp.m.o.
* it reduces the risk of collision if we do two nightly builds within the same hour (rare, but it sometimes happens!).

Once we have this change in place, we can start removing a bunch of hacky workarounds in our release automation dealing with these mismatches. Removing these, in turn, makes our remaining release automation more streamlned, easier to debug, and also safer against surprise breakages whenever we make changes.

This cleanup has been literally years in the unravelling and debugging. For a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes work, have a read of bug#449607, all its connected bugs, and also the dev.planning newsgroup discussions here.

ps: Many many thanks to coop for taking over this and running this to completion. As he said himself earlier today, “we’d have rolled this change out to production weeks ago if only we’d stop doing releases for a few minutes”! 🙂