The Firefox Nightly channel
From MozillaWiki
Nightly cycle tasks | |
---|---|
Purpose | Ensure maximum quality on mozilla-central |
Why | Regression introduced during the nightly cycle identified in Beta/Release only are costly |
Results | Improve quality early, ship faster, identify and fix regressions at the earliest stage possible |
People involved | Relman, Nightly community, Triagers |
This page lists what the release management team should do during the Nightly development cycle on Desktop.
Contents
Summarized process
- Update nightly version in Ship-it at the beginning of the cyle
- Create new blank release notes in Nucleus
- Watch regressions during the cycle,
- File top crashes in Bugzilla from Socorro
- Watch commits and communicate to testers what needs testing
- Check for bugs nominated for tracking and find owners
- Add interesting features to release notes
- Create new flags in Bugzilla for the next version at the end of the cycle
Cycle details
Beginning of a new cycle
- Update the version number on Ship-it on merge day when mozilla-central is updated with a new version number.
- Ask releng for a push of product-details to production once we have all the locales built.
- Copy the previous release notes template in Nucleus with the new version number. You don't have to set it as public as long as there are no note added, a 'coming soon' page will be displayed on mozilla.org as long as the release is created in Nucleus.
- Update Firefox tracking flags in Bugzilla (add flags for new nightly version, deactivate tracking flags for unsupported versions)
During the cycle
- Check for bugs nominated for tracking
- Check bugs filed with the nightly-community keyword, those are filed by our more engaged alpha-testers and are often recent regressions
- Find owners for tracked bugs. This is important as it gives us a chance to fix new regressions and crashes before they move to channels which have more users.
- Track bugs related to new feature development that are aimed for their release.
- File top crashes and newly appearing crashes from crash-stats
- Watch all commits on mozilla-central for interesting features
- Interesting changes should be communicated to our alpha-testers via our @FirefoxNightly Twitter account
- Interesting changes with an end-user impact to the end user should have the relnote flag set
- Write Release Notes during the cycle based on what is nominated to be included in release notes
- Watch reports on Twitter, IRC and other communication channels about major regressions. Ask releng for a patch to be backed out and nightlies re-spun if the end-user impact may lead to loosing alpha testers.
End of cycle
- Check that there is no visual regression on the What's New Page caused by template changes on mozilla.org or gecko changes in rendering a week before merge day
- Ask the Bugzilla team to create status and tracking flags for the next version, ex: Bug 1444839
Android
- We do not maintain release notes for Firefox Nightly on Android
- There is no what's new page for Android