Yesterday’s Club Moz meeting was quite productive as we tackled doing QA tests with Litmus.

I encourage more folks to come to Club Moz next meeting: Tuesday October 30th at 4:30 in SEQ2119 (next to ACS). Every Tuesday is a test day for Mozilla@Seneca and this is a great way of getting your feet wet in Mozilla participation with ZERO prior experience.

If you know how to browse the web you’re all set.

Here’s a quick how-to for those who might want to get a head start at home:

1. Set up an account with Litmus (yes, i know another mozilla account…one day this will all be better, I’m sure)

2. Pick the build version you will run tests for (it’s recommended that you use a clean, new profile):

3. Enter your Build ID and your system info. An easy way to find out your build id is to type “about:” in the browser address bar:

4. This takes you to a page where you can select what kind of tests you are interested in running might be:

5. Make your selection and here you go – a test to run:

Many of the tests are simple things that you might do anyway.

For the competitive out there, Club Moz president Anthony Hughes is currently the 4th highest tester with 3477 tests under his belt…does anyone want to give him a run for his money?

What did I do?

Today, the indexing worked.

See the command here:

cvsindex -server=cvs -source=c:ffmozilla -symbols=c:symbolServer2007092823 -debug > output.txt

And the output.txt.

See how now it is indexing the files?! Cool.

So what did I do differently than last time?

Last Time:

ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Server ini file: C:Program FilesDebugging Tools for Windowssdksrcsrvsrcsrv.ini
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Source root : c:ffmozilla
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Symbols root : c:ffmozillaobjdirdistcrashreporter-symbols2007092823
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Control system : CVS
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Root : :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS program name: cvs.exe
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Label :
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Date : 10/09/07
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Old path root :
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : New path root :

This Time:

ssindex.cmd [WARN ] : Command line option “-server=cvs” is unrecognized.
——————————————————————————–
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Server ini file: C:Program FilesDebugging Tools for Windowssdksrcsrvsrcsrv.ini
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Source root : c:ffmozilla
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Symbols root : c:symbolServer2007092823
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Control system : CVS
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Root : :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS program name: cvs.exe
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Label :
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : CVS Date : 10/17/2007
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : Old path root :
ssindex.cmd [STATUS] : New path root :

So really, the only differences between this time and last time is that I pointed to the symbols on my IIS symbolServer instead of the ones that were in the crashreport-symbols. Same symbols, different location. I think that must have made more of a difference than using -debug which did not seem to do anything (and that’s probably because I just re-read the documentation and it’s /debug).

Now I am going to test it and run some tools on the pdb files to see what’s in them.

I don’t know how many times I can read the 3 main sources of information about this source server business. Everytime I read them it’s like being in a house of mirrors. Tonight I found a new site that refers to a source server. Once again I hear how amazing this source server is, yet no real information about how to make it happen. His final sentence – “After all, “It just works!” Why would I need to know anything more? :-)” is just poking at me as I am so in need of knowing more and can’t find a single human being who knows more.

The main msdn help files state that:

Generally, binaries are source indexed during the build process after the application has been built. The information needed by source server is stored in the PDB files.

So does this mean that I need to add something to the firefox build files that will do this indexing around the same time that the buildsymbols are pulled? Around the time that the build wraps up? And if yes, then what do I put there? Why is there not ONE example of someone successfully writing a source server for their project? If this source server is so amazing (and it sure sounds like it will be) then why no examples? No discussion in the msdn community forums, no blogs, nothing.

I emailed a person who sounded like they had written one for their versioning system, he wrote back and said that it actually wasn’t him, it was another team member.

Is the source server really an urban legend? Has *anyone* seen it in action?