(Interrupting the shorter blog posts about features in the new vcs sync process, to talk a bit about discussions I've been having...)

In Firefox desktop browser and Firefox Mobile, the shipped product is a binary that Release Engineering produces. The process of creating these binaries, as well as the venues for distributing them — the Application Update Service (AUS), the ftp server+website, and various Android marketplaces — loom large in our world. While it is also important to support our developers and make it easier for them to write and maintain the products we ship, if we're forced to prioritize between the two, we know the answer.

Shipping product has been, is, and will continue to be Release Engineering's highest priority.

In B2G land, we don't ship a binary; partners build the binaries and ship them on devices. However, their binaries are based off of code that we deliver to them. And the vehicle for that code delivery is gecko.git; gecko.git is effectively our shipping product.

So if we're in a conversation or heated debate, and someone says the equivalent of "I don't care about partners" or "I don't care about gecko.git", I often hear that as "I don't care about Mozilla's capability to ship Firefox OS". It's not conscious, and I'm trying to get better about that. Most likely that isn't what the other party is intending to say. But if a conversation starts that way, most likely the conversation will end up running face-first into The First Law of Release Engineering.