In our first year of Mozilla development at Seneca – we learned how to file basic bugs, how to upload patches and we followed a module owner or the like so we could see just how much bugmail a person can handle. Now that I’m a Build intern I am learning to use bugzilla on a few more levels.

This is just one (small) example:

These bugs will allow me to go through the process of creating, setting up and deploying 4 new VMs so that I’ll be able to see if they can handle both build and unittest builds. In a perfect world, they will be able to do this and that means we will set up a pool of buildslaves for each platform and delegate work from both build and unittest as needed. The goal is to be scalable and to use as little hardware as possible.

The reason I have to test this is because it’s possible that VMs cannot successfully run unittests as they are written now. We need to know that the unittests can and will run before choosing this method.

More on this soon. Back to bringing WinXP vms up to date with mozilla-build instead of ye olde Cygwin.

If you’ve been banging your head trying to build Firefox on Vista with the newest Visual Studio 2008 express edition (VC9) – know that it is possible now, and with minimal bruising of your forehead.

Two things you need to remember:

1. You have to run start-msvc9 in mozilla-build as administrator (if you do not your builds will fail with messages about bad file numbers and such)

2. You have to put the following four lines in your .mozconfig (for now – keep your eye out for a new rev of mozilla-build which should fix – current at 1.2)

ac_add_options --disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options --disable-activex
ac_add_options --disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options --disable-accessibility

That’s it – after bug 419665 is checked in, there should be no other obvious issues unless you forget to run as administrator or check out when the tree is burning.

Happy Vista building.