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mozillaZine feedHouse (5 未读)

Asa Dotzler: all ears

提交: February 8, 2010, 6:07am CST

Tags: [编辑]

Both ears are now quite clearly up.
Chris Cooper: Tackling the Release Engineering:Future queue

提交: February 8, 2010, 5:22am CST

Tags: [编辑]
The Release Engineering:Future bugzilla component alternately inspires feelings of sadness, loathing, and contempt…and that’s just within the RelEng team!

I’m certain most developers first response to having their bug moved to the Future queue is, “Oh, look, my bug has fallen down a well.” Historically speaking, that may not be far from the truth.

What goes in Future?
Why does the Future component make people get punchy? For a long time, the Future component has lacked a decent description, so developers don’t know what it means when their bugs are moved there. Many have started hording their gigawatts in anticipation.

Bugzilla currently has the following small description of the Release Engineering:Future component:

“For longer term projects that have been agreed should be done, but have no immediate plans to so. These are not be part of the regular recurring triage. Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter also go here.”

Despite the grammatical errors, this description is mostly accurate, but what does it actually mean:
- Triaged bugs with no immediate owners go here.
- Sadly, most enhancement bugs end up here unless they will make the core release process better, more streamlined, etc. quickly.
- Bugs that are blocked on longer term projects in other groups go here until there is something for RelEng to do.
- Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter (or later) also go here. That’s pretty self-explanatory.
Remember: this description is for the Future component ONLY. The RelEng team continues to pick up and work on bugs that need to get done on a daily basis.

I’m thinking about how to improve this description, and will get the description updated in Bugzilla once I have achieved some rough consensus. In the meantime, I’ve posted this description of the Future component in the wiki as an ongoing reference.
The (Ever-Increasing) Numbers
At the time of writing, the Release Engineering:Future component has 343 bugs in it. This number has grown steadily over the past year despite having more release engineers on staff, and having made a great many improvements to our release automation and our continuous integration infrastructure.

Our turnaround time for bugs in the Future component is also not stellar. At our urging, the Mozilla Metrics team recently started setting up a dashboard to give us various statistics on our Bugzilla usage. Bugs don’t get fixed in the Future queue, so it’s hard to make truly accurate assessments here, but there are a lot of aging bugs in there. According to the numbers, fully 50% of the bugs in the Future component are older than 1 month and more than 25% are older than 6 months. How this compares to other teams or areas, I can’t say, but it certainly makes me empathize with developers who feel their Future-ed bugs have gone walkabout.

If it makes you feel better in a sadistic way, the majority of bugs filed by RelEng team members go directly into the Future queue. We’re not overly happy about it either.
I have a way? Is that better than a plan?
Things are getting done, though. For example, over the past month, the number of non-Future, release engineering bugs that are actively being worked on has gone from a low water mark of 130 up to over 200 today. For comparison, over the same period, the total number of bugs in the Future queue has slowly crept up from a low of 302 to 323. Mozilla is growing along so many axes that sometimes it feels like keeping the increase in the number of Future bugs to a linear relationship rather than exponential one is an accomplishment in itself.

So how do we stop the increase and start wrestling the Future component back under control?

The first step is triage. Starting this Thursday, February 11th, the RelEng team is going to have bi-weekly triage meetings to specifically prune down the Future queue.

As part of the triage, we’re going to be touching every bug and updating the whiteboard field with searchable tags. Our goal here is to make it easy to find classes of bugs in the Future queue so that duplicates and overlap can be easily eliminated, and fixes can be batched as much as possible.

We’ll be keeping a list of the tags we’re using in the wiki in case you want to follow along.

There are some classes of bugs that we won’t be able to eliminate (e.g. future goals), but hopefully within a few months, we’ll have the Future queue back under control.

It won’t be a quick fix, but it’s one we’re committed to.
Eric Meyer: Events and A Day, Belatedly

提交: February 8, 2010, 11:29pm CST

Tags: [编辑]
I’m a bad conference organizer.

Why? Because we opened the An Event Apart 2010 schedule for sales back in, um, flippin’ November, and I never mentioned it here. Cripes, I never even posted when we announced the lineup of cities. I could go through the great big long sob-story list of reasons why 2009 was really tough and blah blah blah, but when you get right down to it, I fell down on my job.

Okay. So. Time to correct that.

(deep breath)

Hey everyone, check it out: the complete tour schedule for An Event Apart 2010! Woohoooo!
1. Seattle: April 5-7, 2010 (yes, three days; more on that anon)
2. Boston: May 24-25, 2010
3. Minneapolis: July 26-27, 2010
4. Washington, DC: September 16-17, 2010
5. San Diego: November 1-2, 2010
We’ve got a pretty killer lineup, if I do say so myself. You can get the mostly-complete list from our opening-of-sales announcement last November. It lists the people we had confirmed at the time; there have been a few additions since then. Check out your city of choice to see who’s going to be there! (But always remember that speaker lineups are subject to change: speakers are people too, and life has a way of interfering with schedules. I myself had to withdraw from An Event Apart Boston last year due to a family emergency.)

The price to register for these two-day, one-track Events is the same as it was in 2009, and there are educational and group discounts available for those who are interested.

But wait, I just said “two-day” when the first show of the year is clearly three days. What gives?

Seattle is the site of our first-ever A Day Apart, a full-day workshop that can be attended on its own or as part of a full three days of Event Apart ecstasy. And the inaugural Day Apart will be nothing less than a detailed plunge into HTML 5 and CSS3 with Jeremy Keith and Dan Cederholm. Jeremy handles the markup; Dan gets stylish. It’s going to be fantastic. I’m going to be in the back of the room for the whole day, soaking up as much as I can.

If you want to attend just the workshop, it’s $399 for the whole day if you buy an early bird ticket (available through March 5th). The price goes up $50 when early bird ends, and another $100 if you show up at the door. But I wouldn’t recommend that last, because I don’t think there will be any tickets available at the door. Again: if you show up unannounced on the day of the workshop and ask to buy a ticket, we will most likely have to turn you away, because I expect that there won’t be any seats available.

On the other hand, maybe you’d like to experience more than just one day of AEA goodness. Maybe you’d like to go whole hog and attend both the two-day Event Apart and the subsequent Day Apart, soaking up all the knowledge and enthusiasm and camaraderie that typifies An Event Apart. And who could blame you? If you do that, then the total early bird price for all three days is $1,190, whereas buying the event and workshop passes separately would total $1,294. That’s right: you actually get slightly more than $100 off the cost of the workshop if you attend all three days, over and above the early bird discount. (Or you can think of it as getting $100+ off the cost of the conference. We’re not fussy.)

As it happens, these three-day passes have proved quite popular. So if you want to get your hands on one of those—or on any Seattle tickets, whether one, two, or three days—I wouldn’t wait too long. Our internal analyses suggest that there will come a time, some time before the doors open on April 5th, that the ability to buy a ticket will cease to be. It may even pine for a fjord or two.

As for the four shows that come after Seattle, well, they’re looking pretty popular too.

I know I say this every year, but I’m really excited about what we’ve got planned for the year. Jeffrey and I constantly and (we hope) consistently strive to create an event that we ourselves want to attend, and that’s absolutely true of the shows and workshop we have planned in 2010. I can’t wait to hear what the speakers and attendees have to share. Hope to see you there!
Postbox Team: New and Improved Support for Mac OS X

提交: February 8, 2010, 10:30pm CST

Tags: [编辑]

Postbox now integrates with the Mac OS X technologies and applications you rely on most to get stuff done. Here’s what’s new:

Mac Address Book Support
Postbox provides read and write support for the Mac Address Book. Keep all of your contacts in one location and sync them with your iPhone or MobileMe service.

Send Meeting Invites with iCal
Apple’s iCal can now use Postbox for sending calendar notifications.

Search for Mail Using Spotlight
Postbox provides full support for Apple’s Spotlight to search through message bodies, message header information such as To: or From:, and attachment names.

Exchange Images with iPhoto
You can export photos directly from Postbox into iPhoto, and iPhoto will use Postbox to send photos as well!

Send Link from Safari
Easily send a web page link from Safari using Postbox. Very handy!

Lookup in Dictionary
Direct text-to-Dictionary lookups will help you quickly pick the perfect words.

Drag-to-Dock Message Creation
Dragging a file to the Postbox icon in the Dock will create a new message with the file attached.

Learn more about these new features and how to use them in our Quickstart Guide.

And now, with our new Refer-a-Friend Program, we’ve created an exciting way for you save on Postbox, or even get Postbox for FREE! See our Refer-a-Friend Program Page for details.
Postbox Team: Refer Your Friends, and Get Postbox for FREE!

提交: February 8, 2010, 10:30pm CST

Tags: [编辑]

Our Refer-a-Friend Program is easy! Tell your friends about Postbox, and earn $5 each time someone purchases with your coupon code! Refer six friends and Postbox is effectively FREE!

Step 1 - Save $10 on Postbox!
Use your search skills. Find a coupon code to purchase Postbox for just $39.95 $29.95!

Step 2 - Share your Coupon Code
We’ll give you your own coupon code for “$10 Off Postbox.” Share it via Facebook, Twitter, your blog, email… anywhere.

Step 3 - Make $5 each time someone uses your code!
You get it - make 6 referrals and we’ll send you $30 - the price you paid for Postbox. Any more… and it’s all gravy.

There you have it. Postbox for about the price of a pizza, plus a way to earn it all back and give your friends a discount. Everyone wins!

To get started, search Google or Twitter for a coupon code to Save $10 on Postbox today! If you are an existing customer, simply select License… from the Help menu, and click Get Referral Code.

To learn more, please see our Refer-a-Friend Program page, read our FAQ, or review the Terms and Conditions.

A special “Thanks!” to Charlie Wood of Spanning Sync for his help and advice on the development of this program.