work in progress – turning on reftests in the new native UI for firefox on android

The latest builds of Mobile Firefox are switching to using a Java based UI, which means the tests that depend on a traditional window environment and backend XUL will most likely fail.  In general we have mochitests and some talos tests running, but reftests are a huge piece of testing that hasn’t been working.

In bug 704509, I have a patch to get reftests working with a Java front end.  This is really just using the XUL backend, but making it work with the limited support we have for addons and XUL, here are some differences:

• I am using a bootstrapped extension
• the reftest code needs to specify the window and document we are using
• I am not using a commandline handler, all options are set as preferences
• There is a nasty hack to attach our reftest <browser> to the default <window>

I need to make this work with our current reftest harness for Firefox.  So most of these changes will need to be cleaned up to work in a way acceptable to everybody and minimize the special case hacking for android.

Work In Progress – making Talos easier to run

This quarter I became the proud owner of Talos (well at least for a quarter or two).  Over the last few years talos has not had much churn, but this year (2011 proper) we have seen addons, responsiveness, xperf, mozafterpaint and experiments with eideticker.  With all of this talos has grown and more people are working on writing patches for it.

So there are plenty of efforts underway to refactor talos to make it easier to expand.  This is fine and dandy, but for a developer wanting to help out or reproduce a bug it is next to impossible.  We have standalone talos, but that still requires some effort and hacking.

If you are interested in running talos, or if you have some pet peeve that you have encountered while running talos please file a bug, comment on existing bugs, or let us know in #ateam on irc.