Hunting the Shmoo

Have you ever needed to inspect the taskgraph locally? Did you have a bad time? Learn how to inspect the taskgraph like a PRO. For the impatient skip to the installation instructions below.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of try syntax, it’s a topic I’ve blogged about on several occasions before. Today, I’m pleased to announce that there’s a real alternative now landed on mozilla-central. It works on all platforms with mercurial and git. For those who just like to dive in:

$ mach mercurial-setup --update  # only if using hg
$ mach try fuzzy

This will prompt you to install fzf. After bootstrapping is finished, you’ll enter an interface populated with a list of all possible taskcluster tasks. Start typing and the list will be filtered down using a fuzzy matching algorithm. I won’t go into details on how to use this tool in this blog post, for that see:

$ mach try fuzzy --help  # or
$ man fzf

I’ve previously blogged about why I believe try syntax is an antiquated development process that should be replaced with something more modern and flexible. What follows is a series of ideas that I’m trying to convert into a concrete plan of action to bring this about. This is not an Intent to Implement or anything like that, but my hope is that this outline is detailed enough that it could be used as a solid starting point by someone with enough time and motivation to work on it.