07.18.07
Saying good-bye to an old friend
Monday afternoon, Josh and Sam turned off pawn, Camino’s venerable tinderbox, after many years of faithful service.
pawn was a 450 MHz Blue-and-White G3 with 512 MB RAM and an 8 GB disk which had been compiling builds for Mozilla since about a year after the code was originally open-sourced. pawn started building Camino in November 2003, about halfway between Camino 0.7 and Camino 0.8. pawn worked hard for Camino, building “hourly” builds that let us know right when someone broke something; building the trunk “nightly” builds that everyone could download and test, until April 15, 2006 (two months past the release of Camino 1.0 in February 2006); and running performance tests on “hourly” builds until 2 PM PDT on Monday. If you look at pawn’s performance graphs, you can trace the history of performance improvements (and regressions) of the Gecko rendering engine over the past four years.
In the end pawn became temperamental, in part because of age, in part because changes on the Gecko trunk made life more painful for Macs running Mac OS X 10.3, and in part because new IT policies at Mozilla required community projects to use different network segments that negatively impacted some test results. While Sam and mento surely won’t miss daily make -C mozilla/content clean fun or reboots (or me poking them to do such), we’ll all miss an old friend.
Thank you, pawn, for distinguished service during 7+ years of continuously building Mozilla and Camino, and enjoy your well-deserved rest. 
(And with that, we also bid a fond farewell to another old friend, Mac OS X 10.3 support in Gecko—catch you on 10.4 or 10.5 for Camino 2.0.)