Justdave's Blog

I’m headed to Oxford, UK for a couple weeks for work. I’ll probably still be online, but sporadically, so if you can’t find me, Myk’s in charge for Bugzilla stuff.

Vladimir Vukicevic has just announced a new extension for Firefox called BugWrangler, which adds a toolbar to Firefox to collect locally-stored metadata about the bugs in Bugzilla that you are interested in, and view your bugs sorted by that local metadata.

I’ve heard tons of people asking for “personal keywords” for Bugzilla, and this provides all that without even wasting resources on the server for it, while still integrating with Bugzilla in real time. This sounds like an incredible tool for Bugzilla. I’ll be watching closely!

Well, after 2 years of waiting, we’ve finally branched for 2.18. Along with that comes our first release candidate for the upcoming 2.18 release. You can download it here.

This has been 2 years in the making, and the release process itself isn’t exactly a piece of cake, especially when we have security issues to deal with. Myself and 4 or 5 other tireless folks have spent the last 4 days getting very little sleep while we toss around draft copies of the advisory, finish up the checkins for the last few blocking bugs, and otherwise get all the details worked out. I think Gerv about summed it up better than I could.

We also have a brand spanking new design on the Bugzilla website. It’s a much more professional look than we used to have, and helps us blend in with the Mozilla Foundation a little better. I can’t express enough thanks to Mike Morgan, who redesigned the site for us based on mozilla.org’s existing CSS, and tweaking it enough to give us our own flavor. After what we’ve had for a website for the last few years, it really is quite a beauty to behold. We’d love to get feedback on the website design, or even content. If there’s anything you think should be done differently, you can either post on netscape.public.mozilla.webtools or file a bug.

Things are looking up with Bugzilla. The last couple blockers landed finally over the holiday weekend, and it looks like we’ll finally have a release candidate for 2.18 by this coming weekend at the latest (it may happen sooner). All we’re waiting on now is for the release notes and announcements to get signed off on by the reviewers, which should happen over the next couple days.

I received an SMS message yesterday from Gerv that he is in the hospital with appendicitis. A family member (or a friend?) has also posted a message in his blog saying that he’s in the hospital.

My family will be praying that he comes through it all okay.

Unfortunately, Gerv was the one working on one of the last bugs holding up the 2.18rc1 release of Bugzilla (bug 225687). His SMS message said “I may need a bit more time for that Series groups patch ;)”

We’re all hoping that Gerv gets the easy way out and only winds up in the hospital for a couple days. But just to play it safe (2.18 is already very late), we’re going ahead with the backup plan (bug 243463) to just secure the whole chart system for now until the individual series permissions can be worked out. This may wind up being a good thing to have anyway, regardless of the individual series permissions. I can imagine companies who might not want the general public poking through the reporting tools, so it would help accomodate that as well.

We’ll still try to get the series permissions in before the final 2.18 release, but at least with the security implications dealt with, we can still get some widespread testing on the rest of the release candidate without having to wait for it.