Firefox/Channels/Postmortem/62

Notes for 62 post mortem

10:00am PDT Tuesday September 18 (after the Channel Meeting) Vidyo channel: ReleaseCoordination IRC: #release-drivers

Some stats

• around 340 uplifts to beta62
• uplifts during beta: https://mzl.la/2MmhuTq
• uplifts during RC week: https://mzl.la/2oYt6Ts

What went well?

• WNP live and tested during RC week

• Long beta cycle but still a very stable release post-launch. Bravo! \o/

• Decision to add preference for AutoConfig sandboxing in beta (Talos as well as customers)

• When Liz went off, other release managers have been able to pick up the work without severe issues.

(she should be back next week btw)

Challenges

• Long beta cycle (like we had with aurora a while back now)
  • More code lands in nightly, more codes, more risks (more risk for the next release?)
  • Hard on the release manager owners
  • [tom] from QA perspective they liked the longer cycle
  • [pascalc] Beta cycle occurred during a time when many people were on PTO (summer holidays)

• Fennec Spike in Beta 19 - bug 1485441
  • Filed when it was detected and nominated for tracking
  • (Ritu) This is a good example of pushing RC build to 5% of release and helping catch critical problems.
  • Some discussion about how we can obtain this type of device and whether the service that we are using in October would have this chipset

• ESR52 -> ESR60 migration issues
  • Unable to watershed for older CPU detection - bug 1415336
  • Users of older JAWS versions not e10s-compatible were migrated - bug 1489605
  • Tom Prince: releng & release mgmt should meet to discuss about watershed before the release
    • We (RM) should add this to the checklists
  • RC respin due to problems generating partial MARs - bug 1481121, bug 1488127
    • by the time of 68.1esr, even if we don't enable updates from 60.x until 68.2, we should have them ready and tested
  • Should we call the .0 and .1 ESR releases Betas to see if enterprise users are more inclined to test them before we ship .2?

• Acer partner build bricking - bug 1488934
  • Not caught before shipping due to difficulty in testing these builds
  • This was an extreme edge case scenario (unpacked XPIs being used, support for those dropped in 62), requires migrating from 58 -> 62
  • Working with Softvision to add tests
  • Consider whether partners are impacted when we announce future structural/build/config changes

• Search langpack issue - bug 1489820
  • Langpacks are not easy to use on beta (xpi subdir). Can we do anything to make that easier?
  • beta langpacks are uploaded to AMO but unlisted so they don't get updates. No "beta" update channel on AMO