Mozmill + Buildbot Woes and 1.5.1

• Described our issues with Mozmill + buildbot. We are being launched from within a jobobject on windows and this prevents us from creating an unaffiliated process so that we can add our launched process to our own job object. There are two ways to fix (we think):
• Method 1: Use a different windows API call to create the process. This might work. Experimenting now with this approach. It is the "more correct" way, and the smaller change to mozrunner.
• Method 2: Punt on the issue. We can take the code from automation.py.in that the rest of the harnesses use and we can manage the processes that way. We will likely be revisiting this code once we switch to E10S across the board, but we will have to do that for the other test harnesses too. This has a large impact on the existing code in mozrunner, though it does overall make the code much simpler to write/read/maintain.

Timeline

• We're shooting to get 1.5.1 released as soon as possible since we need a vehicle for the mozmill+buildbot fix above. We don't know how long we have left to work on it, but we'll say we hope to have it fixed by October 8.
• If we release 1.5.1 on oct 8, then 1.5.2 will be released on Nov 19 (six weeks later). Everyone on the phone liked this idea, so that's what we're going with. We'll revisit this if 1.5.1 slips.

Other News

• Refactoring to use local sites rather than remote sites brought test run time down by 45s!
• Everyone should go through Mozmill 2.0? bugs and review them to make sure they are what we want in the 2.0 release.
• Mozmill QA Automation work week Nov 8 - 12