1080874 - Provide UI for getting a regression range URL

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Socorro :: Webapp, task)

Description

[Robert Kaiser]

The stability QA team is often asked to provide a regression range URL (Mercurial pushlog) for a crash, but usually, what we get out of crash data is the first build that showed a regression, i.e. either where the signature first appeared or where it spiked in volume.

It would be awesome if Socorro would have UI to give us such a "regression range" pushlog URL out of the data it scrapes from FTP anyhow.

Example: In bug 1078693, I found that this signature spiked with build 20141002030202 on Firefox 35.0a1 (nightly). Right now, I need to go into https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/ and find that build (2014-10-02-03-02-02-mozilla-central) as well as the one before it (2014-10-01-03-02-05-mozilla-central) and open their firefox-35.0a1.en-US.win32.txt files to find out there changesets so I can manually assemble to following regression range URL: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/pushloghtml?fromchange=14665b1de5ee&tochange=2399d1ae89e9

In the future, there might be places where we could think of directly linking this from other UI, but at the moment it would be great if this could be a standalone report page similar to https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher_ranks_bybug/ where we'd just enter the build ID (or ideally a partial ID, like "2014100203" in the example above, or even just the day portion, e.g. "20141002") and it would report back the regression range pushlog URL for "from the nightly before to this one" (possibly also other channels than nightly, but let's fix it for that first).

Comment 1

[Robert Kaiser]

Here's an email that :bsmedberg sent out recently about something like this:
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tl;dr: I have a tool for generating regression-range links from buildids. http://bsmedberg.github.io/firefox-regression-range-finder/

Often times when we're investigating regressions (crashes, etc), we have the build ID of the nightly where the regression started. But it's not the easiest thing in the world to turn that into an actual pushlog link which lists the commits in the regression range.

To help fix this, I've created a tool that lets you paste in a buildid or two and automatically figures out the proper regression range link, and also links you to the nightly build directories.

This tool is pretty hacky: it loads http://ftp.mozilla.org directory listings to find builds, and then loads the .txt files describing the revisions involved. If we ever changed webserver for ftp.mozilla.org the tool would likely break. But since it's something I do at least once a week and I know other QA people do this even more regularly, I figured it was worth automating.

Right now the tool uses ES6 features `let` and `for...of` and so it only works in Firefox and not in Chrome. I figured for this audience that wouldn't be a problem.

--BDS

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I see the utility here, but I want to reduce Socorro's purview and I don't think this makes sense to do in Socorro.

Marking as WONTFIX.