Max Kanat-Alexander

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 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

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 (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.

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 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.

Well, it's time for another Bugzilla update! And today I just did two releases, Bugzilla 3.4rc1 and Bugzilla 3.2.4.

Bugzilla 3.4rc1

Bugzilla 3.4rc1 is particularly exciting, because it's our first Release Candidate for 3.4. We did a really good job on this Release Candidate, I think--there's only one 3.4 blocker remaining (and it's only still there because we're waiting on an external party to do something). In other words, there are no known issues with the Release Candidate that are so bad that we couldn't just call it 3.4 next week if all goes well, and we've never actually been in that state for a Release Candidate, at least not as long as I've been around the Bugzilla Project.

One of the particularly exciting thing about a Release Candidate is that it has release notes! That means that all the new features are listed. There's a lot of really exciting stuff in 3.4, and you should take a look. There are some gems in the "Other Enhancements and Changes" section, too, so make sure you read that too. :-)

WebService Changes Since 3.3.4

Anybody who was writing WebService clients against 3.3.x development releases should know: we renamed the Bug.get_history method to Bug.history. You can still call it as Bug.get_history if you want, but that's undocumented and not recommended.

Also, we don't send <nil> for NULL items anymore--too many clients didn't support it. Now we just remove items from the returned result if they are undefined. (This is documented in the Bugzilla::WebService documentation.)

Progress Toward Bugzilla 3.6

There's been some activity on HEAD since our last update. We got a new WebService method to get attachment information, Bug.attachments. I've been working on making Quicksearch (the search box in the header and footer) even faster. Greg Hendricks (of Testopia fame) has been working on the ability for administrators to "disable" certain field values (so that they don't show up as options anymore, but remain set on existing bugs). And Bradley Baetz has been adding new hooks and working on improving performance in some important areas.

There's no ETA for Bugzilla 3.6, but if it works anything like how Bugzilla 3.4 works, we will have open development on it until two months after Bugzilla 3.4 is released, and then we will branch for 3.6 and the 3.6 branch will be "frozen" to only bug-fixes.

Bugzilla Meeting

We have a Bugzilla Meeting next week, on Tuesday, July 14. Just read the page if you want more information! Anybody is welcome to attend.

Well, it's time for another Bugzilla update!

Bugzilla 3.4

In the Bugzilla 3.4 area, we just made some more changes to how the login form in the header and footer work. Now it's easy again for users to discover how to reset their password--when we moved the login forms into the header/footer, we at first didn't have any way for people to discover how to reset their password, but now there's a link and everything works really nicely. You can see how it all works on the Bugzilla 3.4 Test Installation.

We're getting somewhat closer to Bugzilla 3.4rc1. We found a few more blockers, so those have to be resolved, and there's also release notes that need to be written before we can have a Release Candidate.

One new feature of Bugzilla 3.4 that we haven't talked much about is the "See Also" field. This is a field where you can put a URL to a bug in another Bugzilla installation or to a Launchpad bug. The "See Also" feature isn't quite complete--in the future, we also want to make it update the other installation so that the other installation knows that you're referring to it. We also want to fix up the display, and get summary/status/resolution information on the remote bug, etc. But for now it does check that you've entered a valid bug URL, and at least you can somehow record that bugs in different Bugzilla installations are related to each other, and there's a WebService interface for updating the field.

For installations that don't need the "See Also" field, you can turn it off by disabling the "use_see_also" Parameter.

Bugzilla 3.6 (HEAD)

We're working on various interesting things for Bugzilla 3.6, though our focus recently has been on 3.4rc1, so there are a lot of patches awaiting review for HEAD that haven't had the time to be reviewed. People are working on the ability to disable field values and some cool WebService enhancements, but of course our main focus is fixing up the HCI issues that the Carnegie-Mellon research team discovered in their 2008 study.

-Max

I just created a Google Code page for the Supybot Bugzilla plugin (what bugbot is using to report changes):

http://code.google.com/p/supybot-bugzilla/

You can use that to get the code and to report issues about it.

I'd love to put the plugin's documentation on there, but the supybot-plugin-doc script throws a traceback when I try to generate documentation for the Bugzilla plugin, unfortunately.

There aren't currently any release tarballs on the page, but if anybody wants one, just ask me and I'll create one.

-Max

Hey hey. So, I was thinking that I'd do a regular (or semi-regular) post on the status of the Bugzilla Project, for anybody interested. This is the first one.

Bugzilla 3.4

We're getting pretty close to releasing Bugzilla 3.4rc1, now. There are only a few blockers left. Mostly they're just awaiting review. I'll also need some help with the release process for Bugzilla 3.4rc1, if anybody wants to help out.

The only significant changes since 3.3.4 will be a lot of bug fixes, a change to the Bug.search WebServices API, and the ability to hide the "See Also" field. The bug fixes are pretty important, though, so if you're using 3.3.4 you definitely want to update to the most recent BUGZILLA-3_4-BRANCH code regularly or update to 3.4rc1 when it comes out.

There are a lot of significant changes in 3.4 compared to Bugzilla 3.2, though. Those will all be listed in the release notes for 3.4rc1. The difference between 3.2 and 3.4 is not as great as the difference between 3.0 and 3.2 though. We're working on having smaller releases more often (starting with 3.4), and it seems to be working pretty well so far.

HEAD (Bugzilla 3.6)

On trunk (which will be Bugzilla 3.6), we've done a fair bit. There's a JSON-RPC interface, support for suexec environments in checksetup, and a lot of HCI improvements. We've decided that for Bugzilla 3.6, our focus isn't going to be adding major new features, but fixing up the features we already have. I wrote a message to the Bugzilla Developers List about it, a week ago or so, and I got a lot of positive responses (mostly on IRC or by private email). If you're interested in helping out, feel free to check out the list of bugs we'd like to fix for Bugzilla 3.6.

-Max

Guy Pyrzak led a bunch of Carnegie-Mellon students in conducting some HCI research on Bugzilla, and they came up with extensive and detailed results.

I have been working on filing bugs in response to their results. I haven't finished filing all the bugs yet, but if you want to follow along with the issues as they are filed and fixed, you can watch the tracking bug I filed to keep track of all the usability issues discovered during the research. Some of them are minor issues that now already have patches awaiting review. Some of them are larger issues that will require work over time to fix. But I am committed to seeing them all fixed as we move forward.

We've fixed Bugzilla's backend pretty well, now. It's time to focus some on the front end.

Anybody who wants to help, please do. Any of the bugs that block the tracking bug and are assigned to "Nobody", you are welcome to take and work on yourself.

-Max

I switched to Thunderbird today and I am really loving it. So far, it's the best email client I've ever used. :-) It has so many nice things about it--but then again, if you're reading this, you probably already know that. :-)

-Max

I have proposed that Bugzilla have a new default status workflow. I wrote my reasoning in a message on the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, originally as an argument for a workflow that Mozilla should move to, but I think that it covers the basic bug-fixing process sufficiently well as to apply to all organizations, and thus should be the default.

I'd welcome constructive feedback, even just statements of agreement. Note that I said "constructive" feedback, not insults or rudeness, which I will most likely just ignore. :-)

-Max

Today for fixing a bug in Bugzilla I needed an event to fire only after the browser had automatically autocompleted the login form (what Firefox, Chrome, and Safari do when you have saved exactly one set of login credentials for a site). Most people would think that window.onload would work, and it does, in one browser--Chrome. Other people might try to use YUI's onDOMReady event, which fires when all the content is available in the DOM. That works in exactly one engine--Gecko.

The problem is that autocomplete happens at different times in different browsers, and you can't even rely on knowing what engine the browser is using--in WebKit-based browsers, it happens at different times depending on what browser is being used. Here's when autocomplete happens in different browsers:

• Gecko: Before onDOMReady, but after window.onload (so use onDOMReady).
• Chrome: After onDOMReady, but before window.onload (so use window.onload).
• Safari: After both onDOMReady and window.onload (so do a 200 millisecond window.setTimeout on window.onload).
• Opera: Never autocompletes forms without user interaction.
• IE: Never autocompletes forms without user interaction.

So the only reliable solution is to fallback to the Safari solution, which is to do something 200 milliseconds after window.onload. I tried 100ms, and I was getting into race conditions where sometimes my event would fire before autocomplete, sometimes it would fire after. I upped it to 200ms as a safe amount.

This is a little annoying if you want something to happen instantly after the form is autocompleted, so what I actually did for Bugzilla was I fired the event after onDOMReady for Gecko, and used the Safari solution for all other browsers.

Anyhow, it would be nice if this was all standardized some day.

-Max

So, today we released Bugzilla 3.2.1, which fixes the longest-standing security bugs in Bugzilla, in addition to a few other security issues. These long-standing security issues were actually public for many years, but it required a lot of re-architecture of Bugzilla before we could fix them.

We also released 3.3.2, which has a lot of cool new features, not the least of which is hiding email addresses from logged-out users.

And we put out Bugzilla 3.0.6 and Bugzilla 2.22.7 as security fixes for people still using those older branches.

Anyhow, you can read the news announcement for more details, and the Security Advisory if you want to read up on the security issues that were fixed.

It feels really great to have these releases out. Although I haven't ever heard of a successful exploit of these security issues, they've been around for so long that it was naggingly worrying to have them there, and it's a huge relief to have them fixed and see the fixes released!

Anyhow, here's a bit of news about Bugzilla trunk, which will be Bugzilla 3.4:

- Our current estimated release date is sometime in May, but that's a very rough estimate.

- We're now in a soft freeze (since Jan 29), which means that enhancements that had patches before Jan 29 can still go in, but any enhancements that didn't have patches at that time can't go in. This allows existing patches some time to pass review and to clean up any feature work that wasn't quite done before the freeze.

- There are a few nice enhancements that should still be coming, including a simplified bug entry page.

- If there are any other long-term major problems that you see in Bugzilla that we haven't fixed in 3.4, please let me know. Point me at a bug, or anything you want. And I don't mean minor things, like the positioning of a button or some text on a page, but big things like how emails used to be displayed to logged-out users. :-)

-Max

For those using bugzilla.mozilla.org, I wanted to let you know that when we upgraded to 3.2, you got access to a new Bugzilla skin called "Dusk." Though I've been attempting to convince the admins of the site to switch bugzilla.mozilla.org over to usnig Dusk by default, it hasn't happened (yet?). So, I wanted to let you know that you can change Bugzilla's skin to Dusk yourself, using the General Preferences page.

Dusk is much nicer than the Classic skin, in my opinion, and I think Bugzilla actually becomes more usable with it. If you want to see what it looks like before you switch over to it, you can either use the "View > Page Style" menu in Firefox, or you can look at our test installation, which defaults to Dusk.

-Max

I don't know what's happened, but for some reason, but in just the last month or so, we've fixed almost every single long-term performance problem, security issue, and common support issue in Bugzilla. All of the sudden we've been really productive on attacking things that have been sitting around for just too long.

I suppose here's what happened:

1. We got out the Bugzilla 3.2 release, so we didn't have all our attention on that anymore.
2. Our architecture is finally at a point where it doesn't occupy all our attention just to maintain Bugzilla, and we're also not spending all our time fixing the architecture. So now we can actually focus on cleaning up all of this old "dirty laundry".
3. I finally started applying The Feature Acceptance Test to Bugzilla, which woke me up and suddenly made it really easy to prioritize things and realize what I need to focus on fixing. "Oh, what blocks Bugzilla from helping people fix bugs?", "Which of these features will most help people fix bugs?"--just asking these questions made it really easy for me to suddenly have a workable priority list.

Anyhow, whatever the reasons are, I'm really happy that we're doing it and I hope it keeps up! :-)

-Max

So, I just released Bugzilla 3.2! That was pretty exciting. :-) It's been about a year and a half since 3.0, but there are actually a tremendous number of changes between 3.0 and 3.2--as many as there were between 2.22 and 3.0.

Some people might be wondering why this release isn't called 4.0, even though it's a major release. Well, that's all explained in the latest Status Update.

3.2 was the first release in a long time where we actually had some help from external companies, too. Xiaoou Wu of Oracle helped us with Oracle support, Red Hat contributed some work on the WebServices, and a few companies funded Everything Solved (my company) to write certain major new features, like the new types of custom fields in 3.2.

I also want to give huge thanks to Guy Pyrzak, the new UI Team Lead for the Bugzilla Project, who led our major redesign of the show_bug.cgi UI for 3.2. We have some other UI work coming up for you in future releases too!

Overall, I'm really happy with the direction that Bugzilla is going. Our architecture is getting better and better--I have actually enjoyed writing new features and customizations on the 3.2 codebase. It's that little "Wow, that was so elegant and simple to add that feature" feeling that's one of the great rewards of refactoring. (And boy have we been doing a LOT of that over the last several years!)

-Max

Sometimes people wonder--how many Bugzilla installations are there? How many people are actually using Bugzilla?

This is hard to say. We tend to get around 100,000 downloads for each new version of Bugzilla, but we have no idea how many of those are complete downloads, how many of them result in working Bugzilla installations, etc.

However, Bugzilla has an auto-update feature which retrieves a file from one of our servers, approximately once a week, provided that a Bugzilla administrator has logged in that week. This was introduced in Bugzilla 3.0, but it wasn't working properly until 3.0.4.

In October 2008 we had 55,998 hits on the update file. Since Bugzilla installations check it roughly once per week, divide that number by 4 and it comes out to probably 14,000 Bugzilla installations that are using version 3.0.4 or higher (which is when this feature started to work).

I'd estimate the average number of users for a Bugzilla at around 200, with the major open-source installations having tens of thousands of users, and the smaller corporate installations having around 20-100. That gives us roughly 2,800,000 Bugzilla users around the planet, counting only Bugzilla installations that are version 3.0.4 and higher, have not disabled the update check, have an administrator who regularly logs in, and are not in an environment where they can't access the update file (which is actually fairly common in locked-down corporate environments).

-Max

The folks at mission control at the Endeavour launch yesterday had PRACA available to them. which is based on Bugzilla. My company, Everything Solved supported NASA on this project, through the San Jose State University Foundation. I'm excited that we were able to help out with the shuttle project, and that our software will continue to be used by the agency for the International Space Station and the future Constellation missions! :-)

-Max

So, I just released Bugzilla 3.2rc2, which is probably the first real "release candidate" I've ever released--that is, as far as we're aware, this could be 3.2 tomorrow, if there are no bugs. Of course, we're going to wait to see what feedback is like, but I'm hoping to release Bugzilla 3.2 two weeks from now.

This is also the only time we've done a lot of UI polish in the RC stage, and I'm actually glad we did it. Part of the reason is that it's the first release where we've really started to focus on the UI (and had some help from real HCI folks, thanks pyrzak!).

-Max

So, I was working on a feature for Bugzilla, and I found that while Gecko (Firefox, Seamonkey) can hide <option> tags with "display: none", in IE (including IE 7), you can't do a single thing to option tags with CSS, except maybe change their text color. IE doesn't even support the "disabled" attribute on options. There are some options around the web for faking the disabled attribute, but they're not that great and I wanted to hide the option, anyhow, not just disable it.

So basically, I wracked my mind--how could I possibly do it? Then I thought, "Hmm, what if I put some other tag in there instead of an option tag?" And lo and behold, I found that browsers will let me have a <script> tag inside of a <select> tag. So I could replace disabled options with a <script> tag as a placeholder, using JS.

But that didn't quite work well enough. Then I found out that IE6 and above support creating commentNodes in the DOM--basically, just adding a comment with some text into a document. So that's what I ended up doing--I replaced hidden options with comments! After about a day and a half of hacking, I now have it all working in a patch on the bug.

Anyhow, I thought this might be useful information for anybody else who's tried to do the same thing.

-Max

Ahoy! This here be a very special day, ye lubbers, fer more than one reason. First, it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! A fine day if ever there was one. Second, today my friend Kristen flies in on one of those aero-planes to visit me after not seein' 'er fer 12 years!

But avast! Most...thirdly, today be the fine anniversary of the day that 10 years ago Bugzilla 2.0 was unleashed upon the seas o' tubes fer yer bug-trackin' use! And we've been deliverin' a smart series of releases in regular-like form ever since. Bugzilla 3.2 will be ourrrr fourteenth major release! That's quite a pack of releasin' we've been doin'. I've been managin' those releases fer about three or fourrr 'a them years, and contributin' a bit longer than that. I'm mighty proud to be a part of it all--'tis a grand thing to work on an open-source project a'used by so many'a ye fer so long.

Feel free to blog about Bugzilla, say a few words in her honor, today. I think that'd be a mighty fun way to celebrate the day. If ye do, link to yer writins from the comments! :-)

-Max