Okay, it’s time for another update as to my activities in MV.

By the time Robcee left last Friday to go back to the picturesque province of New Brunswick, I had come pretty close to having Buildbot installed and ready to be deployed on my CentOS VM.

Today in between wrestling with trying to build on Vista with VC9 (I must remember to “run as administrator” on the mozilla-build shell) I have been learning to deploy my own local buildbot master and a linux slave.

In getting to this:

there were a couple of roadblocks.

1. The current master.cfg and mozbuild.py are written for Builbot 0.7.5 and so I had to make a couple of small changes as per the documentation to account for import changes (no more step, using steps.shell or just steps instead) and also html.Waterfall is deprecated we should use html.WebStatus now.

2. It took a little while to figure out that the “force build” option that you can get when you click on a slave’s name link in the waterfall is actually an option passed in to html.Waterfall as in html.Waterfall(http_port=2005, allowForce=”true”) and this gives you a nice little html form where you can force a build as you need one.

3. The last little glitch was just making sure that all the names matched up. The major lesson learned here was: Never follow directions. Just because someone says to do

buildbot create-slave slave localhost:9989 linux mozilla 

doesn’t mean that will work. You have to look beyond the literal instructions and realize that the slave name must match what is in auth.py and same with the password.

Next goal – learn how to kick unittest machines when they misbehave.

Today was supposed to be “learn all about unit tests” day and instead it was “configure CentOS until you drop” day.

Here’s what I was working with:
Ref Platform VM (CentOS-5.0)
Ref Platform set up instructions
Install scripts that are supposed to help make it all much easier

So the day looked a little like this:

* Wrestling with Python for about 2 hours – after much trial and error with the python path I ended up deleting my messed up ref platform vm, and starting up a clean one. The install scripts caused a clean VM with a python version of 2.5.1 to become a busted, can’t finish make, 2.4.3 version. What?!

* Scrap the scripts, instead follow the instructions as above from the wiki. This brought up a couple of issues. First of all, all the versions on the wiki are a lot older than the ones in the install scripts. With a clean VM you first have to set a symbolic link to gcc-4.1.1 otherwise compiling zope-interface will not work:

ln -s /tools/gcc-4.1.1 /tools/gcc

Now the steps for installing zope-interface work fine. However there is an issue where every time a symbolic link is created, a symbolic link is then also created inside of the symbolic link as a link back to the original item. This is extremely confusing – I just deleted the broken links without looking too deeply into why that was happening. It happened with zope-interface and the twisted/twistedcore.

There are also a few spelling errors in the wiki for the PATH settings, I’ll go in an change those soon.

Now that I am trying to write down what happened, all the glitches seem minor. I swear there was a lot of “Why is this happening?” and studying PATH, PYTHONPATH and PYTHONHOME to see if they were configured properly.

Probably the next step is to study those scripts and see how they can be more easily run on the VM anytime, anywhere because right now – they are hit and miss.

First day of the internship, and things are going well. As my first build on the MBP is running in the background, let me lay out my set up so far. It will be familiar to many of you but I want a list for my own records.

Upon opening up the MBP with a clean install of Leopard, I am faced with the first task of downloading Firefox. What people choose to download is an interesting mix. While my supervisor John O’Duinn downloads the beta version when he needs a fresh build both Armen and myself leap headfirst into the latest trunk build, 3.0pre.

Next in line:
* Mozilla-VPN installer
* Tunnelblick
* Colloquy
* Quicksilver
* Chicken of the VNC
* Remote Desktop for Mac (beta)
* MacPorts
* XCode
* Thunderbird
* TextWrangler (a free Mac text editor that has command line integration – which is awesome!)
* VMware Fusion

I’ve done the build configuration and am just waiting to get my VPN set up properly. Everything here is a bug. As Sean from IT just told me – “If you think ‘Should that be a bug?’ that’s probably a bug”.

Speaking of bugs, I got assigned another small bite today, bug 432003, which is to enable source server on thunderbird windows builds. Two lines and a patch uploaded, nice to have such a minor bug to get back into the swing of things after my 2 week holiday from school.

Day[0] out.