Just wanted to give some quick updates on mozregression, your favorite regression-finding tool for Firefox:

1. I moved all issue tracking in mozregression to bugzilla from github issues. Github unfortunately doesn’t really scale to handle notifications sensibly when you’re part of a large organization like Mozilla, which meant many problems were flying past me unseen. File your new bugs in bugzilla, they’re now much more likely to be acted upon.
2. Sam Garrett has stepped up to be co-maintainer of the project with me. He’s been doing a great job whacking out a bunch of bugs and keeping things running reliably, and it was time to give him some recognition and power to keep things moving forward.
3. On that note, I just released mozregression 0.17, which now shows the revision number when running a build (a request from the graphics team, bug 1007238) and handles respins of nightly builds correctly (bug 1000422). Both of these were fixed by Sam.

If you’re interested in contributing to Mozilla and are somewhat familiar with python, mozregression is a great place to start. The codebase is quite approachable and the impact will be high — as I’ve found out over the last few months, people all over the Mozilla organization (managers, developers, QA) use it in the course of their work and it saves tons of their time. A list of currently open bugs is here.

Just wanted to send out a quick note that I recently added inbound support to mozregression for desktop builds of Firefox on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

For the uninitiated, mozregression is an automated tool that lets you bisect through builds of Firefox to find out when a problem was introduced. You give it the last known good date, the last known bad date and off it will go, automatically pulling down builds to test. After each iteration, it will ask you whether this build was good or bad, update the regression range accordingly, and then the cycle repeats until there are no more intermediate builds.

Previously, it would only use nightlies which meant a one day granularity — this meant pretty wide regression ranges, made wider in the last year by the fact that so much more is now going into the tree over the course of the day. However, with inbound support (using the new inbound archive) we now have the potential to get a much tighter range, which should be super helpful for developers. Best of all, mozregression doesn’t require any particularly advanced skills to use which means everyone in the Mozilla community can help out.

For anyone interested, there’s quite a bit of scope to improve mozregression to make it do more things (FirefoxOS support, easier installation). Feel free to check out the repository, the issues list (I just added an easy one which would make a great first bug) and ask questions on irc.mozilla.org#ateam!