1492494 - find an in-tree home for declarative artifacts manifest

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Release Engineering :: Release Automation, enhancement)

Description

[Mihai Tabara [:mtabara]⌚️GMT]

Follow up from the declarative artifacts mtg from the All-hands. We're working on getting ready to test things end-to-end, first with Fennec nightlies. That being said, we need a place to land the manifest. 

Initially it seemed natural to put it somewhere in the taskcluster submodule in-tree[1] but then, at second glance, it just doesn't feel rirght. If this is going to work smoothly for Releng, and Build team will decide to adopt this to migrate package-name.mk and integrate it within the manifest, then we need to find a better place for this manifest rather than taskcluster submodule.

[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/taskcluster/
[2]: https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/mozapps/installer/package-name.mk

Comment 1

[Mihai Tabara [:mtabara]⌚️GMT]

@ted: 

hi! circling back to our declarative-artifacts conversation from a while back. I was wondering what do you think is the best home for this manifest, assuming this works well and is adopted by both RelEng and Build in the future? 

We initially thought of somewhere within taskcluster module but having Build logic query/download stuff from taskcluster-intree seems wrong. What do you think?

Comment 2

[Mihai Tabara [:mtabara]⌚️GMT]

More work of this validated for Fennec, nightly under bug 1466714.

During Mozlando sfraser had a conversation with mshal and we concluded that declarative artifacts aren't particularly useful here as the build system can't predict which artifacts will be produced without running the build, and so we're unlikely to get a list of expected artifacts programmatically.

Another conclusion was that there could be value in having a way of translating a request for 'Give me the package from build X' into 'this is the artifact', so a user/tester doesn't need to know if it's a .tar.gz .dmg .msi or other. However, it's unclear at this point if declarative artifacts manifests is the right place to put that or not.

This questions however outlive this bug and expand beyond its scope. 
For posterity - manifests currently live under here[1] with a potential clean/reorg soon if we decide to tackle all products across all channels in Q1 2019.

[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/tip/taskcluster/taskgraph/manifests