334456 - Define reference platforms for official builds

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

This is a tracking bug to solicit input to define a reference platform for the three major platforms we ship on.

The specification for these reference platforms should not just include things like compiler toolchain, but the OS itself, any applied patches/security updates, any supporting tools (cygwin/darwinports wget/ssh, etc.) any extra downloads of tools (the MS compiler extensions come to mind), and anything else that's necessary to re-create a machine from the ground up to reproduce a build from a specific point in time.

The goal here is twofold:

1. Complete build [environment] reproducability.

2. To hold an explicit discussion about the support requirements for the environments we want the shipped bits to run on, which may be affected by the build enviornment. Translation: which Linux distros do we actually care about. We actually may be able to support more than we think if we think about it (see bug 329517). Of course, this impacts Macs as well (bug 327092, with its matrix of required-build-but-supported-runtime OSes), and Win32 (all the VC8 requests, including a specific statement about the support of various Win32 client OS versions for each branch) as well.

dbaron points out that this would be a nice opportunity to make profiling work again too.

This bug will block a bunch of upgrades, as it is our current intention to create machine (images, where possible) that meet the requirements specified in this bug, rather than replace/upgrade old tinderboxen, the contents of which we may need to reproduce older versions/builds.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Where do you want this discussion to take place, and where will it be published when we're done?

Comment 2

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Where do you want this discussion to take place, and where will it be published
> when we're done?

Plan right now is to ask a few people what their opinion of the reference platform should be for the three platforms, and then publish that and open the discussion up on the newsgroups/possibly-wiki.

We'll publish the results of the discussion in the wiki too.

Of course, people are free to add comments in this bug as well.

rhelmer was pointing out that for automation, it would be nice if all the Win32 machines had an ssh server installed/running.

This may also be an opportunity to install/use nagios on build machines. Ditto for virus scanning.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

I guess that reference platform should include palmsync on Windows for SeaMonkey boxen (and probably Thunderbird ones, not sure if they do still support palmsync, though it probably would be a good idea to do so). See bug 322568 (and the URL set on that one) for more info what's needed for that.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I'm happy to put up an initial wikipage with the reference build systems that I've been trying to document on the mozilla build pages. Of course things vary widely between branch(es) and trunk.

Comment 5

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

The following pages exist on MDC:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Linux_Build_Prerequisites
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mac_OS_X_Build_Prerequisites
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Windows_Build_Prerequisites

It'd be good to stay in sync (if there has to be duplication). I think that we want the tinderbox reference platform to be a lot more defined than may be appropriate for these docs (e.g. specific version numbers for all installed tools).

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Yes quite, those are my docs ;-)

Comment 7

[J. Paul Reed [:preed]]

I'm marking this resolved; we have a Win2k3/VC8 ref platform image ready to go/deployable, as well as a Linux ref image. The mac stuff, we've gotten an image of for the new Intel macs.