A new way to use Bugzilla

April 25, 2008 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

This was just too good to pass up.

Halfway in the Digital Age at the Daily WTF

UPDATE: Gerv apparently found this a couple days ahead of me and I’m a victim of being behind on my bugmail.  See bug 430508. :)

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bugzilla.mozilla.org now in version control

April 6, 2008 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla, Work 

So this is something we’ve been wanting for a LONG time, and we finally got it set up as we were staging bugzilla.mozilla.org for last week’s upgrade.  The exact code that we’re running on bugzilla.mozilla.org is now directly checked out onto the production servers from a version control system.  What’s more, there’s a read-only mirror of it visible to the public, including all of our custom templates and everything, so anyone is welcome to check out the exact code we’re running and make patches against it if there was something about one of our customizations that bothered you, or you felt like fixing one of the myriad of bugs in the Other b.m.o issues component in Bugzilla that are local to our installation rather than upstream Bugzilla.

We ended up using Bazaar for the version control.  This was a hard decision to make because Mozilla is using Mercurial for most of the newer stuff these days, so we really wanted to follow suit and not have “yet another VCS” in use, but we wanted to be able to merge in code from the upstream Bugzilla repo periodically (which still lives in CVS, and doesn’t appear like that’ll be changing any time soon), and someone was already doing a sync of Bugzilla from cvs->bzr every 6 hours.  Trying to set up any kind of regular import to Hg wasn’t turning out to be very fun.

So, if you want to check out a copy of what we’re running, you can do this:

bzr co http://dm-bugstage01.mozilla.org/bmo/3.0/

Have fun!

UPDATE: Bugzilla’s upstream is now natively in Bazaar and no longer exporting from CVS, and BMO’s source has moved and is now in a permanent IT-supported Bazaar repo instead of hacked onto the staging box. The new URL is http://bzr.mozilla.org/bmo/ (followed by the version number of course, which has changed a few times since then, too, and will probably change again).

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Bugzilla Summer of Code 2008

March 3, 2008 by · Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla 

The Bugzilla project is once again going to be participating in the Google Summer of Code under the Mozilla banner.  Gerv has the details.  If you know of any projects that would be good, be sure to add them to the brainstorming page.  For reference, here’s what we signed up for last year (although we never got any takers to work on them – probably for lack of advertising, which we’ll do this year).

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You can donate money to Bugzilla now

November 20, 2007 by · Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla 

Frank Hecker over at the Mozilla Foundation has just posted about the Foundation’s new directed giving program, which includes the ability to earmark money for the Bugzilla project when you donate now.  This has been a long time coming.  Every so often we’ve had people coming into IRC or asking on our mailing lists where they could donate money and we’ve never really had anything to point them at other than our T-shirts in the Mozilla Store, or the Foundation’s donation page, which didn’t provide any way to say you wanted the money to go to Bugzilla.  Well, now there’s somewhere to go where the money will actually get back to the Bugzilla project, on the Bugzilla project’s donation page.

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Bugzilla @ OSCON 2007

June 25, 2007 by · Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla 

We’re hoping to get some Bugzilla folks hanging out at the Mozilla booth at OSCON this year. Mozilla is blocking off a number of 2 hour slots throughout Wednesday and Thursday where they’ll be advertising specific topics to be discussed at the booth, and we’ll be doing at least one of those, and would like as many Bugzilla folks as possible there during that time slot (probably 3:30 – 5:30pm on Thursday, but yet to be determined). It would also be nice to generally have at least one Bugzilla person there throughout both days (doesn’t have to be the same person the entire time ;) ). If you’re planning to be at OSCON and are willing to help out with staffing the booth, let me know.

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Bugzilla download stats

May 15, 2007 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

Every so often we run stats for Bugzilla downloads just to see how we’re doing.  The numbers that came up today just blew me away.  I knew Bugzilla was popular, but that popularity seems to be growing exponentially recently.

All-time downloads as of a few minutes ago:

Bugzilla 3.0 (released 09 May 2007) :  10,957

Bugzilla 3.0rc1 (released 26 Feb 2007) : 33,227

Bugzilla 2.23.4 (released 02 Feb 2007 – devel snapshot) :  2,945

Bugzilla 2.22.2 (released 02 Feb 2007 – stable) : 73,897

Bugzilla 2.20.4 (released 02 Feb 2007 – old stable) : 9,835

The numbers for 2.22.2, 3.0rc1, and 3.0 (considering it’s only been out for 6 days) were much higher than I was expecting to see. :)

Of course, we all know that downloads != users, but it’s still interesting to look at.

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Why did it take Bugzilla 9 years to get from version 2.0 to 3.0?

May 10, 2007 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

Bugzilla 3.0 was released last night!

I was too tired last night to post anything, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t post something today. :) All the good information is on the release announcement on bugzilla.org.

It was almost 9 years ago when Bugzilla 2.0 was released. We made a big deal about that in the release announcement, and since then I’ve seen the question asked “Why did it take 9 years to get from version 2.0 to version 3.0?”

Well, one of the little known secrets (some of the old-timers might remember this) is there was another attempt to create Bugzilla 3.0 several years ago. The original idea was to start over from scratch, and design with a completely object-oriented back-end in mind, with complete separation between the program logic, and the user presentation, allowing many different types of front-ends to potentially talk to the back end. You can see the remnants of this project in LXR. Many people knew of this project at the time, and since Hixie had already taken the version 3 number, we didn’t want to confuse anyone, so the existing codebase continued to evolve adding numbers to the minor version component of 2.x, even though several of the 2.x releases had fairly major new features in them.

Bugzilla has been using the even/odd version numbering scheme, where released versions always have an even minor version number, and development versions always have an odd number. So since 2.0 came out, we’ve had 2.2, 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 2.10, 2.12, 2.14, 2.16, 2.18, 2.20, and 2.22 using the 2.x versioning scheme. Almost every one of these had major feature improvements. Something else that happened along the way: The vast majority of the design goals from Hixie’s Bugzilla 3 proposal got met along the way, by iterative development of the existing codebase. Bugzilla now uses a templating system for any output going to end-users (be that email or HTML pages, or XML, CSV, RSS, etc). The majority of the back-end code has been refactored into a comprehensive set of Perl modules that do all the dirty work of interacting with the database. The vast majority of the “sloppy code” was rewritten by necessity over the last 5 years in order to make Bugzilla work in Apache’s mod_perl.

So this last summer, some of us realized that Bugzilla really had progressed a long ways, and was certainly deserving of a major version bump. A bunch of us sat down at one of our Bugzilla team meetings and put together a roadmap for what it would take to make us all agree to call it Bugzilla 3.0. By this point, the original Bugzilla 3 project spearheaded by Hixie had long ago died off, and hardly anyone remembered it, so we decided there was no need to worry about confusion (otherwise we would have called this Bugzilla 4.0 instead :) ).

It’s been discussed elsewhere, but very few open source developers ever want to do complete rewrites. Everyone likes scratching their own itch, and usually that’s one or two features they’re missing, and it’s much easier to make changes to existing code than it is to write something completely new from scratch. This little adventure to obtain Bugzilla 3.0 is a good example of that. Hixie’s design for Bugzilla 3 that was posted 6 years ago last week was really pretty good. But very few people joined him to work on it, and the folks that were working on it eventually didn’t have time for it and it died. But most folks understood it was the right way to go, and the Bugzilla 2 codebase eventually evolved into that in little tiny pieces over the course of 5 to 6 years.

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Get paid to work on Bugzilla!

March 20, 2007 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

We now have two projects approved for participation in the Google Summer of Code this summer.  If you’re a student and you’d like to get paid US$4500 to work on one of them, head on over to Google and sign up.  What better way to spend a summer than improving your favorite bug-tracking system and getting paid for it?

If you have an idea for a project other than those two that you’d like to suggest, you can add it to the brainstorming page.

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Bugzilla projects in Google Summer of Code

March 14, 2007 by · Comment
Filed under: Bugzilla 

The Bugzilla project will be participating in the Google Summer of Code this year, with (at least) two project slots under the Mozilla banner.  If you have ideas for projects that can be done to improve Bugzilla please add them to the wiki.

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Bugzilla 3.0rc1 released

February 26, 2007 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Bugzilla 

Bugzilla 3.0rc1 has been released.  Max has more details.

As Max mentions, this really is a release candidate this time instead of a “late beta” like some of our previous release candidates have been in the past.  So to anyone who is maintaining a localization pack for Bugzilla, now’s the perfect time to update it for Bugzilla 3.0, since what’s in the templates now is pretty much what’ll be there for the final release, unless any major regressions are found.

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