Sylvestre's blog

Lately, we, the release team at Mozilla, have started to use again the MozillaReleases account on Twitter.

We are publishing news about the releases, new features, interesting bugs, etc.

If you have suggestions (more technical, more bug reports, etc), don't hesitate to share them in the comments.

Just a small blog post to LLVM developers that the automatic scan-build reports on LLVM+Clang+LLDB+compiler-rt are now run using LLVM nightly.

That brings few advantages:
* New checks quickly available for the LLVM developer community
* Quick feedbacks for scan-build developers on the whole code base
* Automatic testing of the packages generated

Next week, March 18th, in parallel of the new major release of Firefox, we will be publishing our next stable release (24.4.0).

For those who are not familiar with ESR (Extended Support Release), Mozilla maintains a specific version of Firefox for about a year. In these releases, we only backport high-risk/high-impact security vulnerabilities.
This version is mainly used by companies which don't want to update their versions of Firefox every 6 weeks but also some Linux distributions which needs to be maintained for a while.

We published the pre release of Firefox ESR 24.4.0 for testing. No need to go a full qualification but testing of internal websites are welcome.
Please file bugs for any critical regressions you find and make sure to set the need-info? flag on release-mgmt@mozilla.com so that we have visibility into the issue.
Alternatively, you can directly email release-mgmt@mozilla.com or the enterprise list.

Pre release ESR binaries:

• ESR 24 Windows

• ESR 24 Mac OS X

• ESR 24 Linux 32 bits

• ESR 24 Linux 64 bits

I made some changes on http://llvm.org/apt/ for the last 2 months.

• Added trusty, Ubuntu 14.04, as a new supported distribution (on the request of Michael Larabel, Phoronix)

• Support both the stable and development version. Currently, that means that the release_34 branch and the trunk are built. So, for example, clang-3.4 and clang-3.5 can be installed.
  release_34 are only built when a new commit is submitted in this branch. trunk is built twice a day.

• Add a new package llvm-{3.4,3.5}-tools which contains various tools to build software/packages on top of llvm. Contributed by Martin Nowack in the context of Klee.

• Since a C++ 11 compiler is now mandatory, I had to force the usage of a backported gcc/g++ 4.8 (thanks Doko).
  This is the case for Ubuntu Precise (12.04), Quantal (12.10) and raring (13.04).
  The thing is that it triggers a dependency on the libstdc++ 4.8 causing the PPA to be mandatory.
  deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-toolchain-r/test/ubuntu $DISTRIBUTION main
  
  For now, because of the lack of backport of gcc 4.8, I am not providing support for Debian stable (wheezy).

Hello Planet Mozilla

I started as a new employee a few weeks ago. I am working as Release Manager for the next releases of Firefox (both on desktop + android).
As a start, Lukas and I will be working on Firefox 29 (no pressure at all to start with Australis + Firefox account).
I grew up with the first versions of Netscape, followed the Phoenix/Firebird adventures and I have been a supporter of Firefox since then.
I am glad to join such an important project, especially in the perspective of the recent privacy scandals. I think that Mozilla is in the best position to communicate to the public, to denounce certain activities and provides technologies to bypass them.

Besides that, let me introduce myself. I have been in free software for almost a decade.
My previous work as working on Scilab (from Inria to Scilab Enterprises) where I stayed for almost 8 years. Over the years, I worked on various development (C, C++, Java, Python, Scilab, etc), user experience, roadmap definition, release management, R and D / customer project management, management, board member, etc. During this period, I learnt tons of things from coding, release and product management, QA, etc.

In parallel, I worked part time at IRILL, a free software research center (hosted by Inria). I was involved as community management ie organizing event like GNU Hacker meeting, FOSDEM, Euro LLVM, etc and recording them. I had the chance to meet plenty of people from the FLOSS world (including folks from Mozilla who suggested me to join the adventure).

I am also involved in two communities: Debian and LLVM.

The first one is Debian. I started to contribute in Debian to get Scilab properly packaged. 7 years after, I am now maintaining important packages like LLVM, Clang, libedit, emscripten (!) or BLAS/LAPACK, treasurer of the French representative association and organizing the French mini Debian Conference (Debconf) / Meetup.

For the last couple of years, I contributed to LLVM, Clang and LLDB. I participated to the release 3.3 and 3.4. My technical contributions were mainly driven by the packaging, the nightly Debian/Ubuntu packages and also by the rebuild of the Debian archive using Clang (instead of gcc).

And when I am not behind my laptop, I am teaching scuba diving with my girlfriend or hiking, mountaineering, ski touring, climbing, etc.

Yeh, I am a bit hyperactive.