Posted
23 days
ago
by
justdave
We’re finally at the point where I can say we’re ready to upgrade Bugzilla @ Mozilla this weekend. We’re aiming for Sunday evening (probably 6pm PST). I’ll post again when I know how long it’ll be down for (and that’ll be included in the eventual downtime notice on the IT blog as well).
There’s a staging [...]
Posted
29 days
ago
Hey folks! The Bugzilla Update has moved to its own blog:
http://bugzillaupdate.wordpress.com/
If you'd like to subscribe in your news reader, the feed is
... [More]
here:
http://bugzillaupdate.wordpress.com/feed/atom/
There's a new post today that has a LOT of news from the Bugzilla Project, over there. :-)
-Max [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
A long time ago, I promised to write an article on how to display custom fields under certain circumstances… and never wrote it. But as late is better than never, here we go!
One new feature in Bugzilla 3.4 is the ability to display a custom field only when some other field has some given value. [...]
Posted
3 months
ago
A major security issue has been discovered in versions of Bugzilla back to 3.0. We will be releasing a version of Bugzilla which fixes the issue within 48 hours (possibly within 24 hours), and all administrators should be ready to perform the upgrade
... [More]
(which does not require any database changes) shortly after the new version is released.
If you do not wish to do a full upgrade, patches for just the security issue will be available. The patches are relatively small and do not modify very much of Bugzilla. [Less]
Posted
4 months
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
Now that Bugzilla 3.4.1 has been released earlier this month, we can focus on development again. I’m going to give you a brief overview of new features and major changes we did in our code recently:
Bug 214861: You can now use your saved searches to generate new series for New Charts. Till now, you had [...]
Posted
4 months
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
We released Bugzilla 3.4.1 a few minutes ago to fix a security bug reported two days ago. Your installation is only vulnerable if at least one of your products has the “Entry” bit turned on for at least one group. Note that users cannot do any harm: security checks are working fine and so no [...]
Posted
4 months
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
We released Bugzilla 3.4 today, which also means Bugzilla 2.x is EOL (including Bugzilla 2.22). Here is a quick (and incomplete) list of new features/improvements compared to Bugzilla 3.2:
The page to file bugs is now simpler, with
... [More]
“advanced” fields being hidden by default.
The home page has been redesigned to be easier to use by new [...] [Less]
Posted
4 months
ago
I have just posted the tarballs and done the website updates for Bugzilla 3.4! This means that we're out, released, ready to download, install, and go!
Bugzilla 3.4 is the best release of Bugzilla we've ever made. It has tons of
... [More]
great new features, the most exciting of which are listed in the release announcement, so I won't repeat them here. But you should go download it!
The Story of Bugzilla 3.4
As you look through the New Features list of Bugzilla 3.4, you may notice that it fixes tons of major issues that Bugzilla has had since its beginning. For example, we fixed the biggest performance problem in Bugzilla--sending emails when a bug is updated--and we finally hide email addresses from logged out users, to prevent spam. And that's just a tiny taste of what's new. Really, check out the New Features list to see everything.
But you may be asking yourself, why the sudden fixing of all these issues, and why didn't we do it before?
Well, that's an interesting story! From about 2003 to 2008, we spent nearly all of our time fixing up the code of Bugzilla. It needed a lot of refactoring, and we really did it--five years of it! We added new features at the same time as we refactored (remember, Bugzilla 3.0 had the largest number of major new features of any release we've ever done, and we were still refactoring), but the refactoring was our main focus. But finally, finally, with the release of Bugzilla 3.2, we fixed up one of the last major code issues in Bugzilla--we changed process_bug.cgi into a nice, simple series of steps that use Bug objects to do all their work.
After all this was done, we could finally take the time to look around and say, "What next?"
Well, what happened next was what led to such a great Bugzilla 3.4 release. First, I declared a new method of prioritizing work on the Bugzilla Project that put major issues of our current users as higher priority than adding new features for our prospective users. This led to us looking at the major survey items from our 2008 Bugzilla Survey and doing something about all the major requests that we could address immediately. Then we went through and looked at the bugs with the most votes on them, and did something about a lot of them.
And that, pretty simply, led to us addressing the things that people most wanted, and that we could actually prove that they wanted (because we had great survey feedback, or a lot of votes from individuals on our bugs).
Now that we've addressed so many of the individual things that users wanted, look to Bugzilla 3.6 and later for some big user interface and usability improvements--we have the results of extensive usability research that was done on Bugzilla, thanks to students from Carnegie-Mellon University, and we are already addressing the list of issues that that research generated.
Warning for WebService Clients: Changes Since Bugzilla 3.4rc1
Anybody who has been writing WebService clients against the 3.3.x or 3.4rc1 releases should know that we changed a few things in the API between 3.4rc1 and 3.4:
Bug.comments now takes an "ids" parameter instead of a "bug_ids" parameter (we just renamed the parameter to be consistent with out other WebService functions). Also, it will now throw an error if you try to add a private comment and you don't have the permissions to do so. (Previously it just added a public comment if you didn't have the permissions to make a private comment.)
Bug.history now returns its result in a completely different format, one which is more consistent with the format that Bug.comments and Bug.get use.
Progress on Bugzilla 3.6
Since our last Bugzilla Update just a few weeks ago, we've fixed several usability issues, sped up quicksearch, and added the ability to disable field values in global drop-down fields (without deleting the value).
Coming up soon, expect to see a lot of new WebService methods--there's been a lot of activity in adding WebService code, lately.
The End of Bugzilla 2.x
With this release, we EOL'ed Bugzilla 2.22, the last remaining supported 2.x release. That means that only 3.x releases are supported now. It's kind of wild to think that Bugzilla 2.x is "dead", after nearly ten years, and so much of my personal time spent on it. I started working on Bugzilla back in the 2.18 days, and I was pretty much the release manager for three major 2.x releases--2.18, 2.20, and 2.22. It's amazing to think that those releases were so long ago that now the very last one has reached the end of its support life. It's all Bugzilla 3.x (and hopefully 4.x soon) from here on out, my friends! :-)
Subscribe to the Bugzilla Update
There is an Atom feed that you can subscribe to and read in your RSS reader, for just the Bugzilla Update. [Less]
Posted
5 months
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
We had a Bugzilla meeting yesterday, and one question was about the number of downloads of recent releases. Bugzilla 3.4rc1 and 3.2.4 were released last week, on July 8, i.e. 6 days before the meeting. There were 1204 downloads of Bugzilla 3.4rc1, and 4426 downloads of Bugzilla 3.2.4 so far. These numbers look low to [...]
Posted
5 months
ago
by
Frédéric Buclin
We released Bugzilla 3.4rc1 and 3.2.4 a few minutes ago. If everything goes well, there won’t be a 2nd release candidate for 3.4, and so 3.4 could be released later this month or next month. New features in 3.4 compared to 3.2 are listed in the release notes. Both releases also contain one minor security [...]
