Do you manually create Bugzilla comments when you push changes to a Firefox source repository? Yeah, I do too.

That's always annoyed me.

It is screaming to be automated.

So I automated it.

You can too. From a Firefox source checkout:

$ ./mach mercurial-setup

That should clone the version-control-tools repository into ~/.mozbuild/version-control-tools.

Then, add the following to your ~/.hgrc file:

[extensions]
bzpost = ~/.mozbuild/version-control-tools/hgext/bzpost

[bugzilla]
username = me@example.com
password = password

Now, when you hg push to a Firefox repository, the commit URLs will get posted to referenced bugs automatically.

Please note that pushing to release trees such as mozilla-central is not yet supported. In due time.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.

Estimated Cost Savings

Assuming the following:

• It costs Mozilla $200,000 per year per full-time engineer working on Firefox (a general rule of thumb for non-senior positions is that your true employee cost is 2x your base salary).
• Each full-time engineer works 40 hours per week for 46 weeks out of the year.
• It takes 15 seconds to manually update Bugzilla for each push.
• There are 20,000 pushes requiring Bugzilla attention per year.

We arrive at the following:

• Cost per employee per hour worked: $108.70
• Total person-time to manually update Bugzilla: ~83 hours
• Total cost to manually update Bugzilla after push: $9,058.

I was intentionally conservative with all the inputs except time worked (I think many of us work more than 40 hour weeks). My estimates also don't take into account the lost productivity associated with getting mentally derailed by interacting with Bugzilla. With this in mind, I could very easily justify a total cost at least 2x-3x higher.

It took me maybe 3 hours to crank this out. I could spend another few weeks on it full time and Mozilla would still save money (assuming 100% adoption).

I encourage people to run their own cost calculations on other tasks that can be automated. Inefficiencies multiplied by millions of dollars (your collective employee cost) result in large piles of money. Not having tools (even simple ones like this) is equivalent to setting loads of cash on fire.