Spurred on by gps‘s recent mach blogging (and a blogging dry spell to rectify), I thought it’d be worth noting a new mach feature I landed in mozilla-inbound yesterday: build-complete notifications on Linux.

On OS X, mach build spawns a desktop notification when a build completes. It’s handy when the terminal where the build’s running is out of view — often the case given how long builds take. I learned about this feature when stuck on a loaner Mac for a few months due to laptop issues, and I found the notification quite handy. When I returned to Linux, I wanted the same thing there. evilpie had already filed bug 981146 with a patch using DBus notifications, but he didn’t have time to finish it. So I picked it up and did the last 5% to land it. Woo notifications!

(Minor caveat: you won’t get a notification if your build completes in under five minutes. Five minutes is probably too long; some systems build fast enough that you’d never get a notification. gps thinks this should be shorter and ideally configurable. I’m not aware of an existing bug for this.)