ReleaseEngineering/How To/Create new ESR branch

ESR17 process was tracked by bug 796995 and the dependent bugs. The process can be split into 2 major parts: internal and external

Internal changes

This covers changes to configs, buildbotcustom and tools.

buildbotcustom changes for ESR17 were not critical and are not ESR specific.

tools changes

tools changes

• adds new release branch to production-masters.json file
• adds new branch to buildapi's production-branches.json file
• since the config patch introduces new configurations file which are need to be symlinked to the build/scheduler master there is a need for a fabric methos to create the links
• mozconfig whitelist changes (tested in bug 808077)
• preproduction tweks

buildbot-configs changes

Some highlights:

• Explicitly list the platforms (and use lock_platforms) since we don't ship ESR to all mozilla-central/release platforms (android, for example)
• Copy mozilla-beta configs, compare them to the previous ESR release and check if you understand what they stand for
• No dep/nightly L10N builds required, as a result no need to create Tinderbox trees
• check mozilla-beta exceptions (loops) and check if they are aplicable to the current ESR
• for every exception (MERGE DAY exceptions) file a bug to track it

New release configs

• Make sure that the following variables set

releaseConfig['partialUpdates'] = {}
releaseConfig['skip_updates'] = True
releaseConfig['verifyConfigs'] = {}
releaseConfig['ftpSymlinkName'] = 'latest-esr'

• File new tracking bug for the next minor esr release (17.0.1esr) to update these variables
• update previous release configs and set

releaseConfig['ftpSymlinkName'] = 'latest-10.0esr'

• add mozilla2/*/comm-esr17/release/l10n-mozconfig for every platform. Copy them from mozilla-beta and compare to the previous esr configs
• add mozilla2/linux/comm-esr17/release/mozconfig (linux only). We need this for source builder. Will be fixed by bug 748796