741318 - Make use of UTC timezone for the buildid

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1] (away from Feb 12th - Feb 22nd)]

Right now the buildid is bound to the PST/PDT timezone. Reason probably is because all the build machines are located in this timezone. This causes a couple of problems which could be prevented when we would make use of the UTC timezone instead:

* Developers or users who are building Firefox on their own get an offset in their buildid even when the build has been created at the same time compared to the official build machines. It makes it harder to find a corresponding official build.

* We have a set of different test frameworks and tools which are running on machines in different timezones. To build the necessary commands related to timestamps we have to do some complicated conversations (e.g. daylight saving) between PDT/PST -> UTC -> Local Timezone.

It would help a lot if all the build steps would make use of the universal timezone for the buildid and other related dates.

I wasn't able to find another bug about this issue. If there is one please dupe.

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

(In reply to Henrik Skupin (:whimboo) from comment #0)
> * Developers or users who are building Firefox on their own get an offset in
> their buildid even when the build has been created at the same time compared
> to the official build machines. It makes it harder to find a corresponding
> official build.

This doesn't make much sense. The only thing the build ID tells you is when the source was built. If you want to build the same source that an official build is from, you should look at the changeset it was built from and use that. 

> * We have a set of different test frameworks and tools which are running on
> machines in different timezones. To build the necessary commands related to
> timestamps we have to do some complicated conversations (e.g. daylight
> saving) between PDT/PST -> UTC -> Local Timezone.

What are you doing that needs to use Build IDs this much?

I would bet that this has been filed before and WONTFIXed, but I can't remember offhand. I can understand the desire, but I'm not sure it's worth the churn.

Comment 2

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1] (away from Feb 12th - Feb 22nd)]

(In reply to Ted Mielczarek [:ted] from comment #1)
> > * We have a set of different test frameworks and tools which are running on
> > machines in different timezones. To build the necessary commands related to
> > timestamps we have to do some complicated conversations (e.g. daylight
> > saving) between PDT/PST -> UTC -> Local Timezone.
> 
> What are you doing that needs to use Build IDs this much?

It's not about building Firefox but downloading a specific version of Firefox or another application from ftp.mozilla.org. The folder structure especially for tinderbox builds have the unix timestamp but no changeset in it. If you want to download builds via a script you always have to ensure to convert the local timezone to PST/PDT (keeping all the different summer/winter time changes in mind). Otherwise wrong builds will be downloaded because the first build on Apr 25 for me in Europe doesn't necessarily mean the first build on the same day for US. In our case we had to introduce a new timezone class to handle that - not sure if everything is covered. You can see it here: bug 677250 comment 17.

Do we know on how many knobs we have to turn and what other systems would be affected?

Comment 3

[Kim Moir [:kmoir] ET]

I don't this this applies anymore since build artifacts are served by the taskcluster index and listed by revision

i.e.
https://tools.taskcluster.net/index/