escapewindow | mozharness turns 5

Five years ago today, I landed the first mozharness commit in my user repo. (github)

starting something, or wasting my time. Log.py + a scratch trunk_nightly.json

The project had three initial goals:

First and foremost, I was tasked with building a multi-locale Fennec on Maemo. This was a more complex task than could sanely fit in a buildbot factory.
The Mozilla Releng team was already discussing pulling logic out of buildbot factories and into client-side scripts. I had been wanting to write a second version of my script framework idea. The first version was closed-source, perl, and very company- and product-specific. The second would improve on the first in every way, while keeping its three central principles of full logging, flexible config, and modular actions.
Finally, at that point I was still a Perl developer learning Python. I tend learn languages by writing a project from scratch in that new language; this was my opportunity.

Multi-locale Fennec became a reality, and then we started adding projects to mozharness, one by one.

As of last July, mozharness was the client-side engine for the majority of Mozilla's CI and release infrastructure. I still see plenty of activity in bugmail and IRC these days. I'll be the first to point out its shortcomings, but I think overall it has been a success.

Happy birthday, mozharness!

mozharness turns 5

Happy birthday!