Arbitrary Pushlog (ArbPL) recap:

• It shows revision control pushes and the tinderbox build results for specific build trees like tinderboxpushlog (TBPL).
• It is backed by a server which has a database so your browser is not going to launch a DOS attack on the mozilla infrastructure.  On the other hand, if that server falls over…
• It figures out what failed by parsing the failed test logs.  It passes the time savings of this onto you in the form of listing the failures.  It also secretly knows things about failures that it does not tell you.
• For Thunderbird mozmill test runs that experience failures it scrapes the fancy logging goodness out of the logs and exposes them in a pretty UI.  See the teaser post for screenshots.  You can also check to see if we’ve fixed all the Thunderbird mozmill oranges or not and maybe see a fresh new log!
• It’s not capable of serving as a (full) replacement for TBPL at this time.  It does not show tree status (although that is easily fixed and should be fixed sometime soon), and it currently cannot star builds.

What’s new:

• Widescreen display friendly.  It previously assumed you were me and ran your screen in portrait mode because that is the way you can see the most code; now it spills to two columns if your window is at least 1400px wide.  (See top screenshot.)
• TraceMonkey’s mobile build matrix is split out from its desktop build matrix because the column sets did not meaningfully overlap.  No attempt has been made to deal with the other unique aspects of the TraceMonkey tree, although at least all known TraceMonkey builds should be categorized.  (If the builds that were triggered off another repo were split out into their own tinderbox tree so they could use the same mechanism Thunderbird and other comm-central complex repos use, no special work would be required.  It sounds like the tupled repo is going away soon, so it likely should become a moot issue.)

• It now does fancy hierarchical grouping of the failures.  The builder names’ backgrounds are in gray because the failures have been starred.  The builder names would be in orange if the failing builds had not been starred.

• When people merge things or otherwise push more than 8 changesets, we don’t show you everything they pushed, just the top 3 and provide a link to the full log elsewhere.

• I made an effort to help explain what is going on with builds in non-secret code.  You click on a build, you get this lovely box.  Unfortunately I apparently also forgot to expose the secret code in the popup like I was planning.

And last, but not least…!

• ArbPL now uses socket.io magic to provide realtime-ish updates.  Your browser creates a websocket/weird flash object bridge/XHR long-poll/etc. in order to be able to get the build information that’s hot off the press.  The “ish” part of realtime-ish comes from the bit where the presses are a cron job that runs every 3 minutes.  I think I have appropriate abort/retry logic in place now to contend with the half-written JSON and hanging HTTP requests, but I’m still sticking with the safety of a cron job with a built-in death clock until the logs agree with me.

Important caveats:

• If the server restarts, the client is smart enough to reconnect, but not smart enough to re-establish its subscriptions with the server.  Refreshing the page or clicking the ArbPL logo in the upper left to go back to the list of trees and then picking a tree will resolve this issue.  The server only restarts when I push to production, as it were, so there is some other problem if you find yourself constantly needing to refresh.
• Builders in the failure list look like they want to do something when you click on them, but this is a lie for all non-Thunderbird mozmill builders at the current time; those are the secrets ArbPL is keeping from you.

You can use ArbPL for yourself at arbpl.visophyte.org.  You can make your own using the source on github.

As noted by mcote in his post on autolog, the automation team is working on something in this domain, autolog, and I’m hoping to work with them to collaborate / pass-the-torch / or port Thunderbird’s mozmill logging to their solution so Thunderbird can have its fancy logging cake but not have to bake it too.

If you would like to discuss ArbPL/autolog/etc., I think the mozilla.tools group is supposed to be the right place for that.  One caveat is that I can’t seem to find the mailing list proper to sign up, just the newsgroup and google group…?  (Neither https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo or https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/ seem to know about it.)