The number of changeset has decreased (23 for beta6 compared to 43 for beta5). This is a good sign as we approach from the release date of 29. In this release, some top crashes have been fixed and some last bugs for Australis has been address.
Firefox 29 beta 5 has just been pushed to the mirrors. This release is similar to beta3 and beta4 is term of number of commits but their total size has been divided by 2. In this beta, some critical bugs fixed, various sync improvements and, obviously, Australis!
Firefox 29 beta 4 Desktop has just been released. In term of numbers (changeset or diff), this release is similar to the beta 3.
That won't be a surprise but most of the changes in this beta have been related to Australis, Sync and the UITour.
In order to improve the feedback and the beta releases of Firefox, we are going to start publishing some information on beta releases.
For this, we are using the mercurial repository and using these two tags/revisions: --rev "ancestor(FIREFOX_29_0b2_RELEASE,FIREFOX_29_0b3_RELEASE)::FIREFOX_29_0b3_RELEASE" (See bsmedberg's blog post for more information on this syntax).
We are ignoring the commit from the ffxbld robot.
Using the AWS donation, David Suarez and myself have been able to rebuild the whole archive with Clang 3.4.
The rebuild has been done January 10th but, with my new job, I did not find the time to publish the result.
Releases after releases, the results are getting better and better.
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.
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.
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.
Being a bit hyperactive, I have been involved in the organization of two events. I am the main organizer with Alexandre Delanoë of the Mini Debconf 2014 in Paris, January 18 & 19th.
The (great) planning is available here:
https://france.debian.net/events/minidebconf2014/
Saturday morning presentations will be general public, the beginning of Saturday afternoon will be used by the Debian France association to vote the new status (1901 law and Debian Trusted Organization).
Sunday will be more focused on Debian itself.
During the week end, I will be talking about the Debile project, the finance of Debian France and be part of the round table on compiler selection for Debian.
The (mandatory) registration should be done on the Wiki or meetup.com
During the month of December, we have been working with folks from En Vente Libre to create a shop with Debian products:
http://www.enventelibre.org/debian
We have now a shop with plenty of Debian products. The design has been done by Ahmet DEMIR. Most of them are already known by the community (they were sold during FOSDEM or various Debconf) like the Buff, Swiss Army knife or the classical polos.
We just released LLVM & Clang 3.4 (already available in Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty). The clang new release introduces some more warning and error detections. The point of the blog post is not to detail the changes (LLVM / Clang) but more to take a step back on the LLVM and Clang toolchains, usages and dissemination.
iwyu (Include What You Use) has just been accepted in Debian.
This tool, based on LLVM/Clang, checks the headers of a C/C++ file. It will detect which include directives are useless, what could be improve and add comments to explain why #include are there.
Following a thread on the Clang mailing list, I did a quick analysis of the optimization flags used to build C or C++ code.
I used a rebuild result from last mid July of all Debian native packages (meaning that I don't have the log of full Java, Python or other packages without native code) and wrote a small script to count all their occurrences.
By default, deb packages uses the command "dpkg-buildflags --get CFLAGS" which will set the optimization level to -O2. However, many packages and upstream build systems do not respect such flags.
The LLVM toolchain version 3.3 has been released a couple months ago.
Here are now the result of the rebuild of Debian archive using this version of the compiler.
Like the previous releases, we are at a bit less than 12% of packages failing (2188 packages on a total of 18854).
More warnings / errors detections have been added to the software (for example: like this defect of the C++ standard or the detection of unused linker option) causing more build failures, but, in the mean time, we fixed some issues in the Debian packages...
While raw videos of the previous Debconf are available on:
http://video.debian.net/
We, at IRILL, are glad to provide a nice HTML5 interface (and flash if HTML5 videos are not available) to browse all the videos of Debconf 13:
http://www.irill.org/videos/debconf13
Debian France and Debian Swiss associations are now selling products at Debconf.
We are now selling
| Buff |  | 23 CHF / 18 euros |
| Black polo |  | 31 CHF / 25 euros |
| Rugby polo |  | 50 CHF / 40 euros |
| Mousepad |
 | 13 CHF / 10 euros |
We have also some new hoodies.
They come in 4 colors: black, white, grey and dark blue.
With or without zip:
As announcement on debian-devel-announce, I just uploaded java-common version 0.49. This version changes the default version of OpenJDK to version 7.
That means that packages depending on default-jdk/default-jre will be now built with OpenJDK 7 (instead of the 6) and also that the java/javac commands will be providing Java 7.
I also used the opportunity of this upload to update the Java policy.
In parallel of my work on the LLVM Debian/Ubuntu nightly packages, I uploaded a couple months ago the same packages for the stable releases of the LLVM toolchain. By toolchain, this means LLVM + Clang + Clang extra tools + compiler-rt + polly + LLDB.
Previously, they were packaged as separate source packages. Making the maintenance harder and, especially, limiting the packaging of LLDB and polly.