ntt on Oxymoronical

Nightly Tester Tools is being brought back to life

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 21:14:35 +0000

After my last post about how I no longer have the time to maintain Nightly Tester Tools I am happy to say that someone has stepped forward to take over development and maintenance. I’m even more happy that it is one of the Mozilla teams so finally NTT is going to be officially owned and supported by Mozilla.

I sat down with them last week to talk over what I saw as the key goals of NTT and some ideas I had had suggested to me for the future but they also want to hear from you so go and read about their plans and give them your thoughts.

Where is the updated Nightly Tester Tools?

Mon, 17 May 2010 02:39:00 +0000

Many of you nightly testers may have noticed that Nightly Tester Tools’ compatibility override feature doesn’t work with the new add-ons manager and may be wondering when I’m planning to issue an update to fix that. The more astute of you may have noticed that there hasn’t actually been a real code update to Nightly Tester Tools in 2 years, barring a couple of simple app compatibility fixes. Those with a sharp memory will remember that I said just under 2 years ago that I was ceasing work on my extensions in my spare time. I suggested that Nightly Tester Tools might still receive the odd update but obviously that hasn’t happened and the truth is that I can’t see it happening anytime soon. I’m too busy with that whole real life thing to even be able to work on projects I do enjoy, let alone maintain old stuff that no longer really interests me.

New Nightly Tester Tools

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:59:21 +0000

I don’t normally do announcements of new versions of my extensions here but unfortunately there was a problem with the packaging of the last version of Nightly Tester Tools so if you want to get the latest and greatest version then you’ll have to download it manually.

Sorry, I’ll try not to let it happen again.

Easy(er) Leak Testing With NTT

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 22:50:37 +0000

David Baron recently put out the call for there to be more leak testing on trunk builds.Â We have a number of regressions that we need to find and fix before Firefox 3 goes out the door. The best way to do leak testing has always been to use his excellent leak-gauge script which catches more leaks than the leak monitor extension. Unfortunately the leak-gauge script is not the easiest of beasts to play around with.

Extension Updates

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:30:59 +0000

Obviously for those keeping up with this rather minimal blog I’m somewhat behind where I hoped to be since my last post. Still no new release of Nightly Tester Tools so I thought it worth giving a quick round-up of the few extension’s I’m still working actively on and what’s happening with them:

Nightly Tester Tools is getting the main development work right now. My previous few weekends have been spent working on coding zip support so that it can update an extension’s compatibility info on the fly in the xpi file. This will allow the Mozilla extension manager to do it’s job, which is handling the safe install of the extension itself. Right now I’ve slowed down because I’m about to start talking to Mozilla about getting the zip writing component into the Mozilla platform which will undoubtedly require some API changes. That and I don’t have a Linux or Windows platform to do a build of the component on. If anyone wants to volunteer to assist (you need to already have experience of building a mozilla app) then please get in touch.

Zip Writer Update

Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:06:05 +0000

I spent some more time this weekend hacking on my Zip Writer component. It’s now pretty capable. It can open existing zip files and remove entries and append to them, happily rewriting the headers and everything exactly as it encountered them. And the other major win is that I have deflate code up and running which makes compression possible.

All this has allowed me to reintroduce making extensions compatible during the install process in a far safer way than was the case before. NTT can now watch the EM datasource, spot that an extension has finished being downloaded, then open that extension’s xpi file and if necessary rewrite the metedata to claim compatibility with the current version of whatever app you happen to be running in.