Hello from Release Engineering! Once a month we highlight one of our projects to help the Mozilla community discover a useful tool or an interesting contribution opportunity.
This month's project is Release Build Promotion. What is Release Build Promotion? Release build promotion (or "build promotion", or "release promotion" for short), is the latest release pipeline for Firefox being developed by Release Engineering at Mozilla. Release build promotion starts with the builds produced and tested by CI (e.g. on mozilla-beta or mozilla-release). We take these builds, and use them as the basis to generate all our l10n repacks, partial updates, etc. that are required to release Firefox. We "promote" the CI builds to the release channel. How is this different? The previous release pipeline also started with builds produced and tested by CI. However, when it came time to do a release, we would create an entirely new set of builds with slightly different build configuration. These builds would not get the regular CI testing. Release build promotion improves the process by removing the second set of builds. This drastically improves the total time to do a release, and also increases our confidence in our products since we now are shipping exactly what's been tested. We also improve visibility of the release process; all the tasks that make up the release are now reported to Treeherder along with the corresponding CI builds. Some figures One of the major reasons of this project was our release end-to-end times. I pulled some data to compare: - One of the Firefox 45 betas took almost 12 hours - One of the Firefox 46 betas took less than 3 hours You can read more about it on my blog post: https://rail.merail.ca/posts/release-build-promotion-overview.html Feedback and ideas are always welcome! -- Rail - on behalf of the Release Engineering team. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
