
Postmortem on a beta regression - philbo
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/firefox-dev/2016-January/003836.html
======
semi-extrinsic
Being annoyed at how Firefox has handled the introduction of add-on signing,
this stuck out like a sore thumb:

""" the problem was discovered, and filed as bug 1240559. This was on January
18th, which is 8 days before the beta gets shipped to release.

A workaround for add-on developers was posted in
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240559#c10](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240559#c10),
and the bug was marked as a WONTFIX on the 21st.

On the 22nd, an add-on developer reopened the bug, saying that the workaround
wasn’t acceptable, as they wouldn’t have time to fix their add-on and get it
approved before 44 went out the door.

A patch was written, and then the decision was made to land the fix directly
onto release. The add-on author confirmed the fix, and the bug was closed out.
This is what we ended up shipping. """

The add-on developer in question who got this reopened, Ben Bucksch, got it
absolutely right:

""" This is a major goof for ext compat. You goofed, you'll have to fix it.
You can't leave the dirt on our carpet. You can't just remove APIs without
warning and then say "sorry".

This is a must fix. And even if FF4 were to be released tomorrow, you should
still be glad to have found it before it hits end users.

> No, there isn't anything left to do.

NewTabURL.jsm was accidentally removed. There's a trivial fix: Re-add the
file. """

Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal
should be: a stable open-source browser with an awesome add-on community.
Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered. In the process they're
alienating add-on devs, people who make their product more awesome _for free_.
Come on, guys, who gives a shit about whether about:newtab is remotely hosted?

~~~
accountatwork
> Mozilla devs appear to be completely out of touch with what their core goal
> should be . . . Instead the Process is holy and cannot be altered

They made a mistake. They then fixed it and admitted exactly what the mistake
was. Because they did so, they're called completely out of touch.

I often advocate for my employer to be more open in our postmortems, but
responses like this make it impossible for my side to win the argument against
folks who claim, quite reasonably, that admitting any kind of mistake will
result in people using it against us later.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
They made a mistake, which broke an API used by many third parties. The fix
was very simple. Yet they close as WONTFIX until another dev makes repeated
comments that point out this is not tolerable. Then they reopen and fix.

It's the closing and insisting "this is not a showstopper, work around the bug
in your third party code", that indicates to me they are out of touch. What
happened after that was fine.

~~~
phasmantistes
Keep in mind the perspective of the people trying to ship Firefox:

* The bug does not break the vanilla (and therefore vast majority of userbase) firefox experience

* The bug is easily worked-around (as opposed to completely unfixable)

* The release candidates were already being built (which means you don't want to make changes, because you have to rebuild+resend to manual QA+resign)

* The bug was merged in as part of a security fix which they can't risk touching

They're not necessarily out of touch. It could easily be that people who
didn't have all the details (e.g. release managers who didn't realize the fix
was re-adding a single trivial file) were worried about the risks of upsetting
a security release.

Sometimes it takes time for the severity of a regression to work its way up to
a decision maker. And in the end they did exactly the right thing, with 5
separate people all putting in work on a weekend to make it right.

