Category: Bugzilla

We’ve had a page up on the wiki for several months now listing things we know about that interact with Bugzilla. With the release of Bugzilla 3.0 imminent, now is a great time to make sure that your cool app that knows how to talk to Bugzilla or does something cool with Bugzilla data is listed there so people can find it. If you know of anything cool that interacts with Bugzilla that isn’t listed there yet, even if you’re not responsible for it, feel free to add it to the list.

The Bugzilla QA guys just signed off on the 3.0rc1 release, which means now it’s time to actually push that release out the door.  As mentioned in my last post, we need volunteers to help us stage the website updates and so forth, and the job is even bigger this time because this is a major new version instead of just a bugfix update.  Bug 370704 has the list of what still needs to be done.  Any help anyone can provide with the website updates and updating documentation would be greatly appreciated.

In the last couple days, we’ve released versions 2.22.2, 2.20.4, and 2.23.4 of Bugzilla.

Version 2.22.2 is our current “stable” version. We’ve been intending to release this update to the 2.22 series for the last three months or so because it fixes compatibility issues with new versions of MySQL 5 and Template Toolkit 2.15. Those of us that deal with the actual mechanics of making a release happen (all on a volunteer basis) have had other things happening in real life keeping us from working on making it happen for the last few months. The issue got forced in the last couple weeks because of the discovery of a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the Atom feeds. Still, even with a fix for the security bug available the same day the bug was reported, it took us 12 days to release. This really isn’t fair to our users, and it certainly caused us enough strife with people who knew about it complaining about “when are we going to release?”

The process of getting a release pushed out the door (documented here) usually takes about 2 full days (with time off to sleep in the middle) for a single person to complete. It’s a lot of work. Max says he once managed to pull it off in 6 hours, but that’s probably an exception more than the rule. We all have “real jobs” other than working on Bugzilla, which makes even that a difficult chunk of time to be able to commit. We have found in the past that getting 2 or 3 people to work on it together (at the same time mind you, so they can coordinate), it can be pulled off in 3 to 5 hours. But we didn’t seem to find 2 or 3 people who could be in the same place at the same time to do it this time. This is all kind of a roundabout way of saying “we need help!” 🙂 If you look at the documentation link I provided above, the primary stuff we need help with is the pre-release section and the web site updates. Most of the stuff from there down on the list doesn’t take long, and can be done by the acting release manager in an hour or two.

Now that I have a working blog again, I’m going to make use of it and post here looking for volunteers the next time we’re ready to move on a release. 🙂 Our next release, barring any new security issues being discovered, will be a release candidate for version 3.0, but based on the remaining blockers in the buglist, it’s probably a month or two off yet.

None of the official mentions of getting support for Bugzilla say to mail me. They all point at newsgroups or mailing lists. But every so often, someone decides to mail me directly anyway, probably because they found my email address on the header of a source file or something listed as a contributor, or off the project history page or something. Sometimes I try to help, most of the time I just refer them back to the support page on the website. Anyhow, the ones I do get are often quite strange. Take this one for example:

Dear Sir,

I need free bugzilla books, i want to know about bugzilla,.

Send it through mail or particullar site address.

waiting for your reply

(name omitted)

So I sent this courteous (I thought) reply:

http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/ is your best bet if you want free. It’s
viewable online or you can download and print the PDF.

All done, right? Not so, I got this back from him:

Dear Sir,

Thank you, I found it.

It’s contain lot of topics.. I am going to learn this. I am very
interesting to learn this.

Can you please send me the way of studing, that means, what should i
do, what should not i do,

Beacause when i install it, i have faced lot of problems, which is made by me..

Beacause i confused to do..

So, Can you please send me the Crisp Notation of Bugzilla, It should
be Short & Sweet.

Thanking You

With Warm Regards

(name omitted)

I don’t know about you, but to me this is an incredibly vague request. That’s like saying “please tell me everything there is to know about the world in 20 words or less.”

I replied pointing him at the support page on the website, and suggesting he ask more-specific questions when he gets there.

We’re starting the long-overdue process of overhauling our roadmap for the Bugzilla project, and producing what will hopefully be our path to a Bugzilla 3.0. It’s in the form of a wiki page currently and we’ll be making changes to it over the next few weeks. If you have good suggestions, feel free to leave them on the discussion page (or inline if you make sure it stands out enough that we know it’s a comment).

So with that, I present you with our work-in-progress Bugzilla Roadmap.