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.
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Today marks the 5 year anniversary of try syntax. For the uninitiated, try syntax is a string that
you put into your commit message which a parser then uses to determine the set of builds and
tests to run on your try push. A common try syntax might look like this:
try: -b o -p linux -u mochitest -t none
Since inception, it has been a core part of the Mozilla development workflow.
For many years it has served us well, and even today it serves us passably. But it is almost time
for try syntax to don the wooden overcoat, and this post will explain why.
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