918448 - shipit needs explanation around release branches and revisions

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Release Engineering :: Applications: Shipit, defect, P3)

Description

[Hal Wine [:hwine] use NI!]

The current help text does inform the release manager that they should specify just one of "Mozilla Relbranch" or "Mozilla Revision". And the fields activate/deactivate to allow only one.

However, this wasn't clear during 25.0b1 build 2 for fennec, and led to a question. Ideally the form will contain (references to) all needed help, so can be used at any hour, under any condition of stress, regardless of releng availability.

Comment 1

[Hal Wine [:hwine] use NI!]

While all the help text is there, and the fields deactivate to prevent inconsistent entry, the two related fields are visually far apart. And the "deactivate" visual cues are subtle.

One approach might be to remove the Advanced section, and place the "Mozilla Relbranch" field immediately above the "Mozilla Revision" field. The field labeling could be changed to "Mozilla Relbranch or Revision" to reinforce that only one should be supplied.

I don't know if there is a valid use case for a "build 1" from a relbranch. If not, then having the relbranch field inactive for build 1 would also reinforce correct workflow, as "Relbranch" would not be part of the tab sequence for build 1. For build > 1, the tab sequence would land on relbranch first (the more common case) and then skip revision if a relbranch is entered.

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

P3'ing this because it's sat quietly for 6 weeks - clearly it's not super important.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Mass component change for ship it bugs.

Comment 4

[Rail Aliiev [:rail]]

We stopped using relbranches in favour of explicit revisions. No more branching! We can actually drop relbranch from the model for firefox.