Hi Everyone,

tl;dr; I’ve messed up majorly and need to revamp the infrastructure; meaning further delaying any hopes of releasing ANYTHING. Blame lies solely on me as I had contracted the serious case of “Thomas the Steam Engine”-itis.

That said, things probably aren’t that bad; I’m just so deep into this hole that I’ve dug the project into, I certainly can’t see the light of day.

Call me, Mole… Mr. Mole.

— Long Missive —

I have taken up the mantle of the person who will bring bad news. (Could be good news, depending on your point of view, I guess).

But first, a confession.

I screwed up. I admit it. In the past, our old infrastructure’s CI was manageable; just had to fix up some code. But now, things have become untenable as the current build process is completely incompatible with the current CI code and changing the whole backend codebase is requires understanding the current build process (which has changed dramatically since Mozilla moved to using TaskCluster).

(NB: No.. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming Mozilla. Just saying that *I* can’t keep up with their changes, which probably speaks volumes of my competencies and delusional thought process.) So what is needed is revamping the whole CI code to make it work.

That said, since time is of the essence, I’ve consulted with the rest of the guys and we’re moving to Jenkins, since revamping the old CI code would require some hacking at an already Frankenstein-like code, so the technical debt needs to be paid.

Is it the end of the world? No. I’m just particularly unhappy that we’re in this situation; but hindsight is always 20/20. So yes, this means any future releases will depend on getting the whole build process encoded into whatever way Jenkins requires.

Also note that SeaMonkey needs to completely stop relying on Mozilla’s infrastructure (*every single thing*, including this blog, bugzilla… you name it.. we need to be off it) by end of the year.

Anyway, I sincerely apologize for the mess; both to every single one of SeaMonkey’s users (both past and present) and to my fellow devs (again, both past and present). As part of my defense, last year, I thought (with the delusions of competencies) moving to Azure wouldn’t be that problematic and while I did get a ‘running’ (though not really building) infra, everything went crazy near the end of last year as I had realized the required builds and branches needed new tool chains; and building these toolchains required a lot of time and energy. At the end… a failed attempt at keeping up to date with the whole build process.

So… the project is at a standstill.

In any event, I would like to thank everyone for their support in the past and continual support and infinite patience as this project continues to climb this steep (or as Richie from “Bottom” would say, “f’ing” vertical) hill/mountain.

*sigh*

:ewong

NB: In other words… Live and Learn.