mochitests and manifests

Of all the tests that are run on tbpl, mochitests are the last ones to receive manifests.  As of this morning, we have landed all the changes that we can to have all our tests defined in mochitest.ini files and have removed the entries in b2g*.json, by putting entries in the appropriate mochitest.ini files.

Ahal, has done a good job of outlining what this means for b2g in his post.  As mentioned there, this work was done by a dedicated community member :vaibhav1994 as he continues to write patches, investigate failures, and repeat until success.

For those interested in the next steps, we are looking forward to removing our build time filtering and start filtering tests at runtime.  This work is being done by billm in bug 938019.  Once that is landed we can start querying which tests are enabled/disabled per platform and track that over time!

quick tip – when all else fails – “reseat”

While chatting with dminor the other day he mentioned his camera stopped working and after a reboot there was no mention of the camera hardware in the logs or via dmesg.  His conclusion, the camera was not working.  Since I have the same hardware and run Ubuntu 13.10 as he does he wanted a sanity check.  My only suggestion was to turn off the computer, unplug it and take the battery out, wait 30 seconds then reassemble and power on.

Hey my suggestion worked and now dminor has a working camera again. 

This general concept of reseating hardware is something that is easily forgotten, yet is so effective.

Where did all the good first bugs go?

As this is the short time window of Google Summer of Code applications, I have seen a lot of requests for mochitest related bugs to work on.  Normally, we look for new bugs on the bugs ahoy! tool.  Most of these have been picked through, so I spent some time going through a bunch of mochitest/automation related bugs.  Many of the bugs I found were outdated, duplicates of other things, or didn’t apply to the tools today.

Here is my short list of bugs to get more familiar with automation while fixing bugs which solve real problems for us:

• bug 958897 – ssltunnel lives if mochitest killed
• Bug 841808 – mozfile.rmtree should handle windows directory in use better
• Bug 892283 – consider using shutil.rmtree and/or distutils remove_tree for mozfile
• Bug 908945 – Fix automation.py’s exit code handling
• Bug 912243 – Mochitest shouldnt chdir in __init__
• Bug 939755 – With httpd.js we sometimes don’t get the most recent version of the file

I have added the appropriate tags to those bugs to make them good first bugs.  Please take time to look over the bug and ask questions in the bug to get a full understanding of what needs to be done and how to test it.

Happy hacking!