Trunk open thread

How are Firefox trunk builds?

32 Responses to “Trunk open thread”

  1. FredBezies Says:

    Last time I saw them (after building it), they looked ugly and far from being usable for the GUI.

    Let’s hope 1.0 GUI will be ported soon to trunk :)

  2. dewildt Says:

    FredBezies: Do you mean porting the firefox GUI to seamonkey? That is bug 255807

  3. FredBezies Says:

    No, I don’t mean this. I mean : porting firefox 1.0 UI (icons and all other things) to firefox based on trunk.

    Because for a firefox based on trunk, UI still looks like the same as firefox 0.8/0.9 :)

    Ben said porting 1.0 GUI on firefox trunk is one of the more important goal of firefox 1.1, which is going to be released next march.

    http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/

    It was posted a few days ago and on mozillazine.org too :)

  4. Sephiroth Says:

    Peter(6) from Mozillazine sayd, that AVIARY branch is closed. Will there be a new branch tree? I thought the official builds are branch builds, now they are trunk builds or what? I’m a little confuesd :-S
    hm, the official build will still be branch builds, right? because the trunks are not that stable as branch builds and they dont have all branch features, I guess.

    o.0(just some thoughts which keep haunting in my head)

  5. Anonymous Says:

    Sephiroth: Both Trunk and Branch are official builds. Firefox 1.1 will be build from trunk (once everything has been backported) and a Firefox 1.0.1 would be build from aviary.

  6. Bill Mason Says:

    Functionally, the trunk is in good shape. But a number of things needs to be brought over from the trunk and one imagines the trunk breaking for awhile while the dust settles:

    The extension manager needs to be turned on.
    The new FAYT toolbar has to be brought over.

    There are a number of trunk-only bugs. Be interesting to see what happens to them when the branch code lands on them. Among them:

    Bug 255855
    Bug 260713
    Bug 260951
    Bug 265090

  7. Sephiroth Says:

    >Both Trunk and Branch are official builds.
    I meant the official releases like 0.9 and 1.0. Are they trunk or branch?

  8. Bill Mason Says:

    Also, the new plugin architecture needs to migrate to the trunk.

  9. Bill Mason Says:

    >I meant the official releases like 0.9 and 1.0. Are they trunk or branch?

    Branch.

  10. mdew Says:

    will Firefox 1.1 be based upon Mozilla 1.8 features?

  11. Wes Says:

    The “what’s branch or not” question can be mostly answered by looking at this diagram:

    http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html#milestone-schedule

    It’s slightly out of date but what it represents is still true: the Aviary branch, shown in blue, is the source of all the past Firefox releases from 0.9 onwards. Any future 1.0.x revisions will also come from this branch. The Firefox 1.1 release will be off of the trunk (essentially the grey bar at the bottom), as will the Mozilla Suite 1.8 release.

  12. amano Says:

    Well. Firefox 1.1 will not be a pure trunk build either. A few weeks before the release there will probably a new branch created, so that the development on the trunk can go on.

  13. Mithgol the Webmaster Says:

    That’s right… Firefox 1.1 is going to be a branch build, but not from the aviary branch. It will be built from another, more or less separate, branch.

  14. Robert Sheets Says:

    Is there a good way to have both 1.0 and a branch nightly installed on a Windows machine, so that if the current nightly is badly broken, you can still use 1.0 without an uninstall/reinstall cycle, and also so that the nightly won’t touch your 1.0 profile?

  15. anonymous Says:

    set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
    firefox.exe -p

  16. Dennis J. Says:

    from Ben Goodgers blog:

    “the 1.0 launch and for the first time placing info about releases following 1.0 – a release off the trunk tentatively called “1.1” scheduled for sometime around March 2005. We don’t have ambitious goals for this release aside from getting the branch landed on the trunk and ongoing HIG compliance work for Aqua/GNOME, as well as general bug fixing.”

    This makes me wonder why the trunk has been kept open at all if it takes so long to merge the branch back in. Wouldn’t it be better for the next release to just copy over the branch back into the trunk and work from there? Sounds a lot less time consuming unless there has been going on some ground breaking work on the trunk that could not wait to be committed and that I’m not aware of.

  17. Agagooga Says:

    http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk.html

    What’s new on the trunk “since” 1.0

    Bugs listed here are fixed on the trunk but not fixed on the Aviary branch (0.9 and 1.0). Backend bugs tend to be fixed only on the trunk and UI bugs tend to be fixed on the Aviary branch first.

  18. Bill Mason Says:

    >This makes me wonder why the trunk has been kept open at all if it takes so long to merge the branch back in. Wouldn’t it be better for the next release to just copy over the branch back into the trunk and work from there? Sounds a lot less time consuming unless there has been going on some ground breaking work on the trunk that could not wait to be committed and that I’m not aware of.<

    The FF trunk also picks up development from the main Seamonkey trunk in such areas as, for example, the layout engine. So you can’t just copy the FF branch over and overwrite the FF trunk. The two have to be reintegrated.

  19. Bill Mason Says:

    Another thing that needs to land on trunk: all the new prefs for tabbed browsing, where links open, where external apps open, etc.

  20. Steve Says:

    Just tried to access MSNBC Bloggermann, a blog written by Keith Olbermann, with Firefox 1.0. For whatever reason, the page didn’t render at all…and it froze (a first for me, who has been a user since the famous name-change). I then tried Safari…with great success.
    Just thought I’d pass the word along…
    Go to MSNBC.com…and then click on the link for Bloggerman in the upper right-hand corner.
    Steve

  21. Jugalator Says:

    Steve, this link works for here in Firefox 1.0 on Windows 2000:

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

    It was the only Bloggerman link I found. :-)

  22. Adam Says:

    The trunk is wonderful — it’s a bit faster in general, and much faster for DHTML-related stuff. Mostly stable, too. But it certainly misses most of the last several months’ worth of UI work.

  23. Noa Says:

    Trunk doesn’t have the scrolling speed enhancements, it seems… it’s noticably slower in that department.

  24. Markus Lindström Says:

    I made a trunk build earlier this evening, and it came with a nasty surprise… My Aviary build refused to start afterwards, had to rebuild my profile :-s.

    Sooo… I guess we’re back to the ol’ “always backup your profile” adage. ;-)

  25. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    Thanks to people who commented here, especially Bill Mason for his list of trunk-only regressions and Markus Lindström for his advice of backing up the profile before jumping to the trunk. Your comments will make it easier for me to move and move The Burning Edge to the trunk.

  26. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    Overall performance of branch vs. trunk:

    I don’t see anything on Tinderbox that lets me compare branch build speed directly to trunk build speed. The branch tinderboxes don’t have any Tp measurements. I tried comparing trunk in May (Aviary branch point) to trunk now, and I only see a 3% decrease in pageload time on btek (Seamonkey Linux). Maybe I should have compared at the 1.7.x branch point instead because Aviary’s Gecko is supposed to be equivalent to 1.7.x’s.

    I hope Tp doesn’t jump up too much on the Firefox trunk as features from the branch are merged.

  27. Jean-Marc Gillet Says:

    Jesse, did you change clickToView.xml ? Since I moved to the trunk, the “flash [[Click to play]]” rectangle lost its “button” contour.

  28. Jesse Ruderman Says:

    I have not changed clickToView.xml recently.

  29. Bill Mason Says:

    Just another small item for the branch/trunk differences list: the trunk still has Google as the only default search bundled into the search bar.

  30. Bill Mason Says:

    And another (I know, I won’t shut up): Talkback is not available in Trunk builds yet.

  31. Rick Tilson Says:

    I’ve been using the trunk builds exclusively since 20040926 because of these two “problems” in the branch:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248987
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=262547

    I’ve had no problems using the trunk until recently. about:plugins crashes FF since 20041112 or so. I only noticed this recently and don’t know when it started. Sure, the trunk may not be as pretty; but at least it works the way *I* want.

  32. Bill Mason Says:

    >I’ve had no problems using the trunk until recently. about:plugins crashes FF since 20041112 or so. I only noticed this recently and don’t know when it started. Sure, the trunk may not be as pretty; but at least it works the way *I* want.

    This is bug 269472, caused by the patch that was checked in for bug 265936. Since that patch has been backed out, you should not be seeing this crash in today’s builds.