The repository has been created, the buildbot patches have been r+ed and we are now so, so close to having a full switch over of Talos from CVS to Mercurial. Talos has long lagged behind the rest of the Mozilla universe by stubbornly staying with CVS. The main sticking point was a belief that we would have to install Mercurial on all Talos boxes to get parity with the current CVS set up - as Talos is checked out from CVS per-test run by all Talos boxes. In the end, I found that I could avoid the requirement of getting Mercurial installed on upwards of 300 Talos boxes running 7 different operating systems. The new design has Talos downloaded as a ZIP per-run, making the system version control agnostic.
Right now we are only blocked on Releng Downtime - unscheduled for week of Sept 27, 2010 . This is a mega-downtime bug that has been accumulating blocked bugs for weeks while Release Engineering tries to find a gap in the Firefox 4 beta 7 code freeze schedule to safely close the trees and do landings. You can play along at home with the code freeze by watching the beta 7 blocking bugs.
For now all Talos patches are being landed in both Mercurial and CVS. I wish good luck to all Release Engineering and developer folks working hard on beta 7, for the simple selfish reason that I’m very much looking forward to never, ever having to check in a patch to CVS again.