Justdave's Blog

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.