Author: justdave

On Friday, I pushed a small update to bugzilla.mozilla.org that fixed bug 452799, where users who didn’t have ‘canconfirm’ privs in Bugzilla were posting bugs that had a status of NEW rather than UNCONFIRMED.

This morning, I pushed an update to bugzilla.mozilla.org containing a plethora of additional fixes to address concerns raised since the Bugzilla upgrade.  This morning, we’ve picked up fixes for:

• Bug 452793: (The other half of the issue which was fixed Friday) The default status selected when you file a new bug and do have ‘canconfirm’ privs is now NEW instead of UNCONFIRMED.
• Bug 452810: The wording surrounding the checkbox to add youself to the CC now says “Add me to the CC list” when you aren’t on it, instead of just “myself.”
• Bug 452734: The keyword chooser has been replaced with keyword autocomplete.  NOTE: If you installed the greasemonkey script to remove the keyword chooser, you’ll probably have to remove that script to get the autocomplete, since it hooks on the same event listener.
• Bug 452798: The CC list is now visible again by default, and as a bonus, it’s now searchable via Firefox’s find-as-you-type feature.
• Bug 452733: The [Classification] is no longer shown in front of the bug summary.
• Bug 452746: The link to the bug in the header no longer contains an extra space.
• Bug 452891: The “visually jarring” dashed border next to the line numbers in the Diff Viewer has been removed.
• Bug 452749: The midair page once again specifies who you midaired with.
• Bug 344559: Add a Commit button near the form fields at the top of the show_bug page so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom of the comments if you’re only changing a field at the top.

Fixes for admins:

• Bug 452898: Milestones can once again be marked inactive.
• Bug 452914: Multiple problems were fixed in the flag editor related to the “fixed in version” field not being dealt with correctly on a product change.

Hopefully this fixes up some of the more major concerns people had.  There’s still more to come.  At this point I’m plannng on daily pushes to production as the fixes become available.

UPDATE: Some people are reporting broken CSS and things looking strange…  hold the Shift key and hit Reload if that’s you.  Your browser is probably caching the old CSS.

So bugzilla.mozilla.org got upgraded to Bugzilla 3.2 last night.  Since the upgrade, there’s been a lot of complaints about the new UI.

First off, given the differences in the way Mozilla uses Bugzilla compared to a lot of other places, some of these complaints are valid.  But, please try to be polite and state exactly why you think you have issues and suggest ways for improvement.  Don’t just run around saying it sucks or file bugs stating that you’re ticked off at the world because we broke your workflow.

One of the primary complaints Bugzilla as a product has received over the years is how the UI is ugly and hard to manage.  The last year or so the Bugzilla developers have been spending a lot of effort to fix that problem, with the assistance of professional UI designers.  Some of them are taking personal offense to some of the feedback we’ve gotten so far this morning about the UI changes because it makes them feel like all the work over the last year was for nothing if everyone just wants the old UI back.

Yes, in some cases, maybe you just have to suck it up and learn a new way to do things.  In others, there’s probably a lot of room for us to still clean things up.  In either case, please don’t burn the Bugzilla devs in effigy or anything. :)  Be kind on the bugs you file (but do file them).  Be constructive.  Don’t say “This and this are bad they way they are now, please put them back how they were.”  Do tell us “this is my usage case and what I need to do with Bugzilla, and here’s why the old way helped me be efficient doing this. Let’s come up with a way for it to be easy for me to do this again.”  In all honesty, I bet there’s use cases that weren’t thought of in the current design, and maybe it was just overlooked.  Give them the benefit of the doubt, and let us work with you to get something set up that makes your life easy again (maybe we’ll come up with something even better than both the old way and the current way, who knows?)

The major upgrade to 3.2 is done.  All the schema changes that took hours to run are in place.  Deploying changes to the UI at this point is just be the flip of a switch and it’ll just be live with no downtime at all, in most cases, so we can continue to tweak as we go over the next few weeks.  But please try not to get pissed at us and let us help fix it.  We really weren’t intentionally trying to break your world, you know. 🙂

On bugzilla.mozilla.org, when you run a search, if your browser supports “server push,” Bugzilla will show you an interim page while the search runs.  Currently it shows an animated dino head (left) chomping on bugs, and the text “Please wait while your bugs are munched retrieved.”  It’s cute and all, but it’s kind of getting old.  And being that the page is entirely a cosmetic thing designed to entertain you while you wait, we should change it out once in a while anyway.  We’re planning to upgrade Bugzilla tomorrow night, and it’s the perfect opportunity to spice it up a little.

Gerv’s got a few ideas over on bug 438362… a neat javascript backed game where you click on the ants or somesuch.  If you like it or think you’d hate it, comment here (go try the mockups on the bug first).

If you have other ideas, or can implement one of the existing ones, feel free to post them on the bug.  I have a couple ideas, but no artistic skills to implement them…

• A Mozilla dino standing there waiting for bugs – Buggie walks over to him carrying a basket of critters and hands it to him.
• Buggie standing there with his hand shielding his eyes from the sun, turning his head back and forth like he’s looking for something…

Maybe if we have several of these things, it could randomly pick one each time.