New Bugzilla roadmap in progress
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.
AJAX for 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 T-shirts!
We have Bugzilla T-shirts! Go check them out!
Bugzilla 2.20 is 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 2.20 feature freeze and 2.18.1/2.19.3 release plans
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.
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 
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Hoping to breathe some new life into the Bugzilla project
I explained most of this on the Bugzilla developer’s mailing list the other day, but I figure it deserves a little wider audience, so I’m reposting it here.
As mentioned in my previous blog entry, I was hired by the Mozilla Foundation a couple weeks ago. My primary responsibilities will be system administration tasks, however there will probably be some time for Bugzilla that can be squeezed in there, particularly when there are features they need for mozilla.org’s Bugzilla. They also only hired me part time (25 hours per week). After a careful review of the family finances with my wife, we decided we could make it work on that level of income, and so I opted to just leave my employment at that rather than picking up another job to make up the difference, with the express purpose of being able to spend the rest of that free time on Bugzilla. Last week, because of the Firefox 1.0 release, I got in lots of extra hours because we had to set up and/or reconfigure a half a dozen servers on the fly to pick up the extra load. This last week and probably next, I’ll be in catch-up mode. I’ve got two years of partially ignoring the mailing lists and most of my bugmail to catch up on.
The reviewers list on the website got updated yesterday. It’s now accurate. There are people I will accept reviews from that are not on that list, and that I will probably ask to do reviews from time to time, but I took off everyone who hasn’t actually done any reviews in the last 6 months, since if they’re not around to do regular reviews, there’s no point in telling people to make requests of them. I also added on several of the new people that we’ve added to the review team over the last couple months that hadn’t been added to it yet (and who have been some of the more active reviewers, despite them not being listed for people to know they could make requests of them). Those are the folks who it makes sense to have listed, since they’ll be the fastest to respond.
The roadmap page is next on my list on the website. It’s quite out of date, and doesn’t even reflect our current development model anymore. I’m going to attempt to get that cleaned up right after I finish reviewing this patch I keep promising Joel I’m going to tackle
Bugzilla 2.18rc3, 2.16.7, and 2.19.1 are out
Bugzilla 2.18rc3, 2.16.7, and 2.19.1 are out.
The best information about them is in the Bugzilla Status Update.
Among the questions answered are why 2.19.1 wasn’t called 2.20rc1.
What kind of bug reporter are you?
Benjamin Drieu wrote up a cool classification of the different types of bug reporters that he’s run across. I thought it was worth sharing.
New bugzilla.org website!
As mentioned the other day, in my previous post, the mozilla.org website got redone again the other day, just a few weeks after we updated bugzilla.org to match their previous look and feel.
Well Mike Morgan has done it again, and updated bugzilla.org to match.
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