TL;DR - In bug 1543241 (alias 'mach-busted'), we now have a central clearinghouse of bugs for broken mozilla-central tooling. You can invoke |./mach busted| to get a list of known outstanding issues, and |./mach busted file| to report a new one.
Few things burn up productivity quite like broken tooling. If a developer cannot build, launch, test, or debug the code, they cannot meaningfully work on it. We’ve made significant progress in recent years towards tools that break less often. This work comes in various forms: making the tools more robust and automatic, testing them better, sandboxing them, and reducing the supported configuration matrix. This is great stuff - but voluminous technical debt and limited resources mean we aren’t yet at the doorstep of a world where tools never break. In the short term though, we can substantially mitigate the impact of tooling breakage by reducing the average time spent getting people back on their feet. Historically, the developer experience in these situations tends to look like this: https://bholley.net/images/productivity.gif This happens because we lack a reliable way to steer developers around known pitfalls while they’re being fixed. Filing a bug isn’t a good way to get immediate answers, and searching all of Bugzilla is hit-or-miss. An IRC ping often works, but one needs to guess which person got all the previous pings about this same issue and therefore knows the workaround. In practice, this results in a barrage of pings to a few catch-all experts, who then have less bandwidth to fix the tools. My hope is that mach-busted can help by centralizing all the active showstoppers in a list that’s easy for both the users and maintainers of the tools to scan. This only works if the list stays small - so if the proper fix will take time, we should land a temporary fix to make the tool fail gracefully with a suggested workaround (see bug 1542862 for an example). It also only works if developers record new problems they encounter with |./mach busted file|. You may have already tumbled into the lava, but you can save many future lemmings from the same fate. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
