Hunting the Shmoo

Last time we looked at some ways reviewers can keep the review process moving efficiently. This week, let’s put on our author hats and do the same thing.

In the next two posts we will examine the etiquette of using Phabricator. This post will examine tips from the reviewer’s perspective, and next week will focus on the author’s point of view. While the social aspects of etiquette are incredibly important, we should all be polite and considerate, these posts will focus more on the mechanics of using Phabricator. In other words, how to make the review process as smooth as possible without wasting anyone’s time.

Let’s dig in!

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

This old addage is valuable advice that has been passed down through generations. But it hasn’t stopped these people from rewriting command line tools perfected 30+ years ago in Rust.

This week we’ll take a quick look at exa, a replacement for ls. So why should you ignore the wise advice from the addage and replace ls? Because there are marginal improvements to be had, duh! Although the improvements in this case are far from marginal.

Following up last week’s post on some mach try fundamentals, I figured it would be worth posting some actual concrete tips and tricks. So without further ado, here are some things you can do with ./mach try you may not have known about in rapid fire format.

There is a lot of confusion around mach try. People frequently ask “How do I get task X in mach try fuzzy?” or “How can I avoid getting backed out?”. This post is not so much a tip, rather an explanation around how mach try works and its relationship to the CI system (taskgraph). Armed with this knowledge, I hope you’ll be able to use mach try a little more effectively.

Mozilla developers often need to juggle multiple build configurations in their day to day work. Strategies to manage this sometimes include complex shell scripting built into their mozconfig, or a topsrcdir littered with mozconfig-* files and then calls to the build system like MOZCONFIG=mozconfig-debug ./mach build. But there’s another method (which is basically just a variant on the latter), that might help make managing mozconfigs a teensy bit easier: mozconfigwrapper.

In the interest of not documenting things in blog posts (and because I’m short on time this morning), I invite you to read the README file of the repo for installation and usage instructions. Please file issues and don’t hesitate to reach out if the README is not clear or you have any problems.

Have you ever submitted a patch to Phabricator only to have reviewbot reveal dozens of lint errors all over? Or worse yet, have you landed before reviewbot had a chance to analyze your patch and been backed out over lint failures? If so fear not, we’ve all been there. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little embarrassed when it happens. Luckily for you, it’s pretty easy to eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again!

If you’re working with mozilla-central on Windows and followed the official documentation, there’s a good chance the MozillaBuild shell is running in the default cmd.exe console. If you’ve spent any amount of time in this console you’ve also likely noticed it leaves a bit to be desired. Standard terminal features such as tabs, splits and themes are missing. More importantly, it doesn’t render unicode characters (at least out of the box).

Luckily Microsoft has developed a modern terminal that can replace cmd.exe, and getting it set up with MozillaBuild shell is simple.