Yesterday, for the very first time, we started shipping Linux Desktop and Android Firefox nightly builds from Taskcluster.

We now have a much more secure, resilient, and hackable nightly build and release process.

It's more secure, because we have developed a chain of trust that allows us to verify all generated artifacts back to the original decision task and docker image. Signing is no longer done as part of the build process, but is now split out into a discrete task after the build completes.

The new process is more resilient because we've split up the monolithic build process into smaller bits: build, signing, symbol upload, upload to CDN, and publishing updates are all done as separate tasks. If any one of these fail, they can be retried independently. We don't have to re-compile the entire build again just because an external service was temporarily unavailable.

Finally, it's more hackable - in a good way! All the configuration files for the nightly build and release process are contained in-tree. That means it's easier to inspect and change how nightly builds are done. Changes will automatically ride the trains to aurora, beta, etc.

Ideally you didn't even notice this change! We try and get these changes done quietly, smoothly, in the background.

This is a giant milestone for Mozilla's Release Engineering and Taskcluster teams, and is the result of many months of hard work, planning, coding, reviewing and debugging.

Big big thanks to jlund, Callek, mtabara, kmoir, aki, dustin, sfraser, jlorenzo, coop, jmaher, bstack, gbrown, and everybody else who made this possible!