632897 - Need to enable reftests on Fennec Desktop Builds

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 623613

(Release Engineering :: General, defect)

Description

[cmtalbert]

So, bug 615386 landed.  This breaks running reftest on devices for the forseeable future.  While we could #ifdef the code that landed and run, what we're running is of questionable value because it would not be run with cross-process layers.  

Since we're shipping fennec with cross-process layers enabled, we should test that.  After bug 615386, the only way to test this (until we spend some time fixing reftest for device) is to run reftest on Fennec Desktop Builds.

We'd like to investigate turning on reftests for Fennec Desktop Builds.  That's what this bug is for.  It looks like we do have this ability in buildbot (see bug 511282), so I'm hoping this is a somewhat simple matter of adding Fennec Desktop Reftests to the proper buildbot config in order to enable them.

Note that we only need to run Fennec Desktop Reftests on linux machines.

Note that other test suites: mochitest, talos, etc are *NOT* affected by this change and efforts to run those on devices are able to go forward in parallel.

Note also that the Firefox based work for bug 594876 and its dependencies are likely related here, but I'm not exactly sure if the RelEng issues in those bugs w.r.t. firefox apply to running Desktop Fennec.

Filed 632895 to get support for reftests on device rebuilt. Once that bug is completed, we will be able to also have reftests on device.  Bug 632895 in no way blocks this bug.

Comment 1

[Chris Jones [:cjones] inactive; ni?/f?/r? if you need me]

Let's catch up on this over the phone.

Comment 2

[cmtalbert]

Ok, so on the phone, cjones, mfinkle, jmaher and I talked it over.  We agreed that since reftest doesn't use any application chrome (it creates it's own browser element for testing) then it really doesn't matter if reftest runs a "firefox" or a "fennec" build.  What's important is to be properly testing the cross-process layer code.  So in that light, we're going to close this bug as a DUPE and I'd like to direct everyone's attention to bug 623613 which tracks getting these reftest-ipc tests running on the linux firefox builds.  

We decided that bug 623613 is the important effort here that we all ought to get behind and it is now a Fennec blocker.

Followups/questions on 623613, plz.