Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter (December 2022 & January 2023 Edition) Inbox

Welcome to the December 2022 and January 2023 edition of the Engineering Effectiveness Newsletter! The Engineering Effectiveness org makes it easy to develop, test and release Mozilla software at scale. See below for some highlights, then read on for more detailed info!

Highlights

Contributors

  • Olivier Giorgis (ogiorgis)
  • Carine Dengler

Detailed Project Updates

Bugzilla and Bugbug

  • Webhook improvements including new API endpoint to list your current webhooks and status.
  • Github push commits will soon create comments in related bug reports and even close a bug.
  • Suhaib implemented several improvements to make autonag more accurate in detecting inactive users: PR1809, PR1810 and PR1842

Build System and Mach Environment

CI and Treeherder

Crash Management

  • Alex Franchuk implemented a minimal crash ping using the Glean backend and work has started to port this to Android as well.

Fuzzing and Sanitizers

1806832 - Enable TSAN mochitest-chrome by default in CI

Lint, Static Analysis and Code Coverage

OS Integration and Security

PDF.js

  • Fenix (nightly) is now able to display PDFs
    • The find-in-page feature is working as in normal web pages
    • An API to support saving a PDF was added to GeckoView

Power use

  • Kris Wright landed bug 1748378 providing a way to have low power thread pools which will run on low power cores where it is supported. As a start, this is applied to the background IO pool.
  • Profiler tooltips on power tracks now show the CO2 equivalent, thanks to Chris Adams and Fershad from The Green Web Foundation.

Phabricator , moz-phab, and Lando

Release Engineering and Management

  • Johan Lorenzo shot a promotional video about the way Firefox for Android uses Mergify. Interview was also published as a post on their blog.
  • Andrew Halberstadt added support for authenticode ev signing to signingscript
  • Ben Hearsum is making plans and filing bugs to simplify Taskcluster usage and onboarding for new projects.
  • Gabriel Bustamante is making incremental progress on releasing Mozilla Firefox builds in .deb packages. So far we’ve got: repackage tasks to create Firefox .debs from Mozilla Linux binaries, a distribution repository to track package uptake and configure the client, and a WIP patch for Google Artifact Registry support in beetmover (firefox-deb-repackage meta-bug)
  • Geoff Brown and Johan Lorenzo migrated Focus (Android) to the new Android Monorepo (meta-bug 1797704). Next step: Move Fenix.
  • Johan Lorenzo optimized the time to get Android builds started (bug 1807237 and bug 1807237). It was a 3-year long issue that took Release Managers’ mental space. The number of scheduled was also reduced to what is actually necessary (bug 1803141)
  • Pascal Chevrel identified through the Local Firefox project that Spanish built-in dictionaries were missing for some locales even though there was a suitably-licensed dictionary available. As a result, Firefox builds in the Spanish from Spain (es-ES) and Spanish from Argentina (es-AR) locales now come with a built-in dictionary for the Firefox spellchecker! This change will also be shipping in the upcoming ESR 102.8.0 release as well.

mozregression

  • Zeid Zabaneh investigated and resolved an issue preventing testing Android on Windows (bug 1794416).
  • Zeid Zabaneh added support for universal2 builds for macOS, allowing mozregression to run without Rosetta on arm64 (bug 1810220).
    • Thanks to Jan-Erik Rediger for adding support for universal2 builds in glean-sdk to help support this release (bug 1810737).
    • Also released in 5.3.0, which included many other quality of life improvements.
    • Also fixes a mozregression-gui issue on macOS 13 (bug 1802359).

mots

Other

  • Documentation: Olivier Giorgis fixed an old bug (1557020). Touching any documentation has removed the TOC and making the link harder; Olivier also removed many warnings in the doc.
  • Documentation: Carine Dengler added a check to make sure that the number of warnings in the documentation doesn’t increase.

Thanks for reading and see you next month!