On ftp.m.o, we now use the full BuildID in the directory names for nightly builds. For example:

Before: ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2011-06-20-12-mozilla-central

After: ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2011-07-13-03-07-41-mozilla-central/

This is actually more important then might first appear, because this means our automation will avoid user-visible problems we’ve hit in the past. Occasionally, we get two nightly/clobber builds within an hour, and hence both builds were both placed into the same dated directory. This caused problems for people who downloaded one build then got updates expecting the other build; the user is then broken.

Further, we have lots of munging code that deal with different directory-name-formats on ftp.m.o. Each time we fix a bug like this, it means we can then trim and refactor our automation code even further, making the remaining code cleaner, easier to maintain and more reliable.

There were a million-and-one little details to keep straight, in order to make sure nothing broke during this change. Most of these were surprise, undocumented, dependencies – all fun to figure out and debug. Apart from a brief problem with updates, nothing broke when coop rolled this out. Nice work coop, thank you!

(If curious, there’s lots more details in bug#449607, and in coop’s blogpost#1, blogpost#2.)

(Closing this also closes our 5th oldest bug – filed on 07aug2008 – which makes seeing coop complete this even sweeter! Thanks to coop for grabbing this bug from me, and driving it down.)