Getting Bugzilla 2.18 Released

If you keep up on the tech media, you’ve surely read by now (or will soon) that Bugzilla 2.18 has finally released. And getting it out the door was by no means easy.

Aside from the 9 months it took to get through the “release candidate” phase of releasing, the actual process of releasing seemed to go on endlessly once all the release-blocking bugs were gone. The majority of that process involved staging a massive update to the www.bugzilla.org website.

The problem came when the night before release, I got an IM from my mom that my Uncle, who had been in the hospital for the last week, was terminal, and had chosen to have the life support removed the next day. Needless to say, I high-tailed it to the other side of the state to see him before he died. More about that in my previous blog entry if you haven’t seen it already (it’s in my personal category, which Planet and Feedhouse don’t syndicate).

There were several people that helped, but I really must commend Max Kanat-Alexander, who took up making patches for almost all of the web pages and posting them to Bugzilla, so when I had some time later that night, I could just grab the patches, make a few minor edits, and post the new pages to the website. Considering that I had an iBook with me with almost nothing installed on it that was useful for web editing, that was a BIG help.

All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with this release. It took us forever to get there, but now that it’s done, it’s a big leap over our previous stable release (2.16). And 2.20 is looking even more promising (and more likely to release on time 😉 )