Late Friday the 4′th, of June; I was looking to checkin a series of patches that I had previously pushed to the try server and got it to pass all tests. This series was a large block of the checkin-needed work in Bugzilla.

Now being a person who hates (within reason) merge’s in the history of m-c I went ahead with a |hg pull --rebase| for my MQ Queue full of all those patches.  This to move everything up to tip, help stave off any .rej files from failed (trivial) hunks, etc.

So, here I am doing all this, and I break stuff! In particular during the landing of Bug 542222 (on Changeset d8dc49d5bd60). Sadly it took until the next day for a few people to notice. The correct patch includes all the rename information I was supposed to push.

So What Went Wrong?

It turns out there is an existing bug in Mercurial, which has been fixed in Mercurial Version 1.3 and newer. Of course this particular bug was Footnoted on MDC as well.

This problem is compounded by the fact that MozillaBuild version 1.4 (which is the latest as of this writing) ships with Mercurial 1.2, a version which still contains this bug!

I advise anyone who has push access, or even better who USES hg rebase to upgrade their Mercurial Version TODAY. [Note, MozillaBuild will not pickup the install directory by default, you'll need to change the PATH yourself, I did it for myself in my .bash_login]

The way forward?

As far as the solution to fixing what I broke… The mozilla-central tree was closed today to avoid added problems, and smarter minds than me are working on potential solution(s) to the problem in a thread in the Newsgroup mozilla.dev.tree-management.

For MozillaBuild, my hope is that Bug 557210 can be fixed sooner than later, and that we can release a newer MozillaBuild package to fix this. Within the next 24 hours, I will look into getting that bug fixed, as repentance to making this error myself.

The End?

Boy do I hope so! I hope this is the END of any all errors or mistakes relating to this type of history snafu. Not only does this hurt Hg Annotate (significant for this directory), but it would hurt the electrolysis landing as well (as there are non-trivial changes to netwerk/ that if this was fixed right would make it relatively trivial to merge in). so long story short I AM SORRY TO EVERYONE.

Feel free to follow Mossop’s suggestions for some fixes, or see the Mozilla Wiki for what we have for the current API. This is brand new to Firefox nightlies so the MDC docs are not yet written but should be coming soon.

Please set your targetApp Versions appropriately.

Something Good is Coming

For a while now this process has been broken on m-c due to the libffi landing (Bug 550602).

The problem, we discovered, was due to the GNUMake “Old Style Suffix Rules” which pymake does not (yet) support.

Needless to say, with a quick turnaround by Mike Shaver (from when he heard I had a patch up) the issue is now fixed!

So, you all can now happily Build with Pymake (again)!

[1] — “Given that they don’t publish sub-scores for the parts of the benchmark, don’t provide their benchmark’s tests in a way that can be read (much less run individually), and don’t explain how their final score is computed from the sub-scores, the credibility of these folks is about 0 for me right now.” — Boris Zbarsky (source)

Go beyond Google searches — By Joe Kissell , Macworld — an article describing ways to search other than with Google. Does mention SeaMonkey, but describes it as unable to alter search providers. I’d appreciate if someone comments there explaining that it is possible and a brief “how to”.

First the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The seven things you may (or may not) know about me:

1. I started my programming “career” when I was awfully young with an AOL mini HTML page. Which consisted of ascii smilies (including some alt+numpad combinations I found interesting for AOL Chat Rooms). Later moved to batch programming, then QBasic, before I even learned OF javascript.
2. I learned of the existence of W3C and the HTML and CSS WG’s at some point after I started working on mozilla.
3. I never took any programming classes until late college (basic C++ course) — after I had already been programming with mozilla for a while.
4. I am a dad!
5. I have never been out of the country, though I would like to. I have only ever stayed (briefly) in 3 other states. And only 1 of them was without my parents. (Maine, Florida [Disney], and with my and my fiance: Pensylvania)
6. I have a strong love and fondness for Star Trek, though I don’t forsee myself ever going to a convention. (Nor have I ever used KaiRo’s LCARSTREK theme) TNG was my favorite, followed closely by Enterprise.
7. I attended Catholic School most of my life. While I do find myself very spiritual I do not currently attend church, and have an open mind. I specifically avoid debates/conversations about religion and politics (strong opinions in almost all cases)

For fear of planet.mozilla.org killing me, I won’t tag many there, (as this has already propogated nearly all of planetmo) and instead tag some other people I do read regularly, outside of this group.

The people I’m tagging:

1. Chris AtLee — Because his work is interested, and he did not get tagged, far as I can see.
2. Sean Martell — Talos scares me, but hopefully this will make Sean scare me less
3. Raymond Chen — Author of “The Old New Thing” blog. Has more readers than most of the mozillians here, but he always has something interesting to say.
4. John August — I started following his blog during the Writers Strike, and never stopped. (I find myself always at a brain fart when composing anything written, and I am intrigued at the subjects he writes about, even if I am unable to achieve or understand them)
5. (6 and 7..) The Geekdad crowd.  In particular at least Russ Neumeier who’s posts I usually enjoy the most.

More to come in coming weeks…

As of today, December 19th 2008 — I am the father of a healthy son, Joseph Ellis.

7lb 7oz, 20″ long.

This will be a big change for me, and an exciting one. I still can’t picture how I came from being a child to a father, but its a journey I’m ready [as I'll ever be] to lead my son along. And who knows, perhaps I can get him interested in programming for Mozilla [or really anything] by age 5!

But all in all, chances are he’ll only be interested in video games and toy trucks, and nerf guns. But well that’s childhood I suppose I should not make him grow up too early — after all he can’t even crawl yet.