947006 - [Tracking bug] Use a deterministic version of gecko in gaia Travis tests

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Griffin (:jgriffin)]

In Travis Gaia tests, we currently pull down the latest mozilla-central B2G desktop build each time the tests are run.  This makes identifying gecko-related bustage in Travis difficult, because the gecko version changes randomly, and is only obvious by looking at the logs.

To improve the situation, we could consider doing the inverse of the way we handle gaia commits in gecko-based tests:  add a gecko pointer to gaia, use this pointer when running tests, and auto-update the pointer whenever gecko changes.

We could implement this as follows:
1 - add a gecko.json file to the gaia repo, which would contain a url to the gecko build to use for running tests
2 - update 'make b2g' in gaia to download the build specified by gecko.json, rather than the latest build available
3 - add a bot to automatically update this pointer by making a commit to gaia each time a new gecko (mozilla-central?) build is finished (or potentially, after a certain test job on TBPL goes green)

This is similar to the work we did in adding gaia.json support to gecko; see bug 868597 and dependencies.

If we chose mozilla-central as the basis for these auto-updates, we'd only be adding a dozen or so commits a day to gaia.

We'd have to be careful to update the gaia.json bot (see bug 868602) to ignore these changes, to avoid getting in an infinite loop.

Some of this work is in gaia, the rest is rel-eng, so if there's agreement on the overall approach, we can create bugs to track the various separate pieces.

Comment 1

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw]]

We have one problem with mozilla-get-url currently, see bug 939787: it doesn't always get the most recent build (as in 'built with the most recent code').

That said, it would be a good thing to have deterministic jobs, because nowadays if we respin a job we can have a different gecko.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on