Category: Bugzilla

Bart wants to pay for AJAX in Bugzilla. If you think you can help him out, go have a look.

Personally, I would absolutely love to get some of that stuff working in Bugzilla. 🙂 I’m a big fan of clean user interfaces. Bugzilla has a legacy to clean up after though. There’s been a lot of UI work on Bugzilla in recent months, but there’s a ways to go yet.

My main rule for getting it contributed back to the Bugzilla project: Don’t replace functionality, only add to it. There’s a lot of people that use Bugzilla from text-based browsers or small devices, and we can’t break that. Make it really cool and easy to use if your browser can handle it, but make sure you can still get the job done (even if you have to jump through a few more hoops) on a less-capable browser.

We have Bugzilla T-shirts! Go check them out!

Bugzilla 2.20 was released last night! Go get it!. Thus starts the 1-month countdown for comments prior to freezing for 2.22 (only a month because 2.20 was slightly late and we’re trying to catch up — the trunk has actually been open for a while).

Make sure to go read the status update as there’s a lot of new stuff going on with Bugzilla that will be pretty exciting.

One correction, if you already read the status update, is that we’re waiting a month after the 2.20 release before freezing for 2.22 (the status update originally stated 2 weeks, but that’s been corrected). So October 30th is the freeze date (only 45 days late) and the countdown timer on the right-hand side of my blog is correct.

I’ve had way less time than I’ve wanted to spend working with Bugzilla lately (and even less updating my blog). It’s great to have good people like Max Kanat-Alexander and Frédéric Buclin and the rest of the Bugzilla team staying on top of everything and giving me less to worry about. My congratulations to the entire Bugzilla team for an outstanding job with the release itself and dealing with all the last minute problems that always come up (thus the late release).

My involvement should be improving before too long, as I’m no longer the only sysadmin at Mozilla. The intern we had this summer is contracting part-time during the school year, there’ll be an additional full-timer starting in a week or two, and we still have at least one sysadmin position open that I’m sure will eventually be filled. Even with the new help it’ll take us a while to catch up, but it won’t be forever, and I can always look forward to that.

Bugzilla’s feature freeze for version 2.20 starts today (Tuesday).

Here’s the plan.

I’m probably going to wait to enforce the freeze until late in the day because several people seem to have major projects pending that are this→←close to landing, and would be very painful to suddenly put those on hold for 2 or 3 weeks. But nonetheless, freeze starts sometime today.

I’d like to release 2.18.1 and 2.19.3 this coming weekend. To make that happen requires a bunch of volunteers to help out with website updates, release notes, and getting a status update ready to go and so forth. I’d like Max Kanat to coordinate that, so get with him (mkanat on irc.mozilla.org/#mozwebtools) if you want to help.

The blocking2.20 flag has returned. If you know of any bugs that you think should be considered to be release blockers, please request that flag. I expect the release of 2.19.3 to generate a lot of new blocking2.20 bugs.

We’ll create the 2.20 branch, release 2.20rc1, and reopen the trunk as soon as we get all the blocking2.20+ bugs dealt with. Hopefully that’ll be within a few weeks. In the meantime, the trunk will be closed to keep people focused on the release blockers.

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 😉 )