I've set up the release automation staging server for the Mozilla 1.8 branch (Firefox 2.x) to also generate nightly builds and depend builds on checkin to the branch (using buildbot's BonsaiPoller). I outlined some of the advantages to this release automation/nightly+depend integration in my previous post.

You can see the results on the Mozilla1.8-Staging Tinderbox tree.

The main impediment to taking this live are the performance test machines. These machines currently only cycle when a new build is available, but ideally we'd want them to keep re-testing the same build as many times as possible, to get more stable test results. Since the Tinderbox-driven depend builds currently continously cycle instead of waiting for checkin, we tend to get several test builds for the same source code as a side effect.

These machines forge their start time to match that of the build it came from which allows for easily matching up checkins and build times to performance results, but this doesn't really make sense if we're doing multiple test runs per build.

I've started a thread in the mozilla.dev.builds newsgroup with the subject "moving Mozilla1.8 tinderboxes to Buildbot" for general discussion about this idea.