You can also follow a number of our contributors (some of whom don't blog) on Twitter.
HTML Email
Guest tip from Stefan Arentz:
“Bugzilla actually does have HTML emails! [As of version 4.2, but it’s been backported to bugzilla.mozilla.org’s 4.0 installation – Ed.] I always though that it did not because I did not look further than the “Email Preferences” tab. But there actually is a “Preferred email format” under the “General Preferences” tab.
This makes Bugzilla emails 100x easier to read on a phone.”
Bugzilla API 1.2 Released
I am proud to announce the release of version 1.2 of the Bugzilla REST API. This maintenance release has a bug fix or two, and some features useful to the admins of Bugzillas which BzAPI is pointed at.
The installation of BzAPI 1.0 on api-dev.bugzilla.mozilla.org will go away in 4 weeks, on 19th December. There is a limit to the number of old versions we can support on the server, particularly as the older ones can put a larger load on Bugzilla. Please use either the /1.2 or the /latest endpoints. Now that BzAPI has been stable for some time, tools which earlier rejected using the /latest endpoint may want to reconsider.
Maintaining Multiple Versions of Documentation in a Wiki
Dear Lazyweb,
I know of some software, and it has documentation. I want to be able to maintain this documentation, for the general good of its userbase. At the moment, its documentation is XML files in a VCS, with their own special build procedure with prerequisites. That makes them hard to modify, and as a consequence they are often out of date and certainly not as good as they could be.
Requirement A): I’d like the documentation to be web-editable, because that makes it really easy for anyone to edit quickly, which makes it much more likely the documentation will actually be up-to-date. I want the URL for the “latest version” to always be the same URL.
Requirement B): My software has multiple versions. Once I release a version, I’d like to keep a copy of the documentation in the state that it applies to that version. It may not change much again, but needs to be able to accept bug fixes. However, trunk documentation development must continue. In other words, I need to be able to branch the documentation, check in independently to each branch, and give people URLs to either a branch or the trunk. Each version should have a URL containing the software version number.
Is there any software out there, ideally already in use by the Mozilla project, which can meet both A) and B)? A) is met by all wiki software. B) is met by all version control software. But I haven’t found wiki software with the concept of branches, and I haven’t found a VCS which can display documents prettily and has a web-based interface for editing.
These requirements don’t seem uncommon. Proprietary software solves them. Is there anything open source?
bugzilla.mozilla.org Now Supports BrowserID
You can now log in to bugzilla.mozilla.org using BrowserID, courtesy of a Bugzilla extension I wrote. Log out and then click the “Login” link in the header and then the orange “Sign in” button to try it.
You can do this – unless, that is, you are a member of certain particularly sensitive groups. While Mozilla has great confidence in the BrowserID technology, it does not have perfect confidence in my coding ;-) Therefore, we are restricting who can log in until we get a little more experience with my extension. Eventually, it’s possible that we might go the other way and require BrowserID for certain sensitive groups, once BrowserID primaries appear with 2-factor authentication. But that’s a little way off yet.
If you visit your permissions page, you can see if you should be able to log in using BrowserID. If you are listed as a member of the “no-browser-id” group, you shouldn’t. Otherwise, you should. The no-browser-id group is currently made up of members of the following groups: admin, bz_sudoers, autoland, generic-assignees, hr, infrasec, legal, and anything with “security” in its name.
Cleaning up Bugzilla
RPMFusion's Bugzilla has gathered a number of bugs over the years and, for lack of maintainance, bugs filed against EOL-ed versions of Fedora have never been closed. The result is a number of open bugs:
| Fedora 8 | 2 |
| Fedora 9 | 2 |
| Fedora 10 | 13 |
| Fedora 11 | 8 |
| Fedora 12 | 10 |
| Fedora 13 | 6 |
| Fedora 14 | 45 |
I've added a new resolution, EXPIRED, in bugzilla.rpmfusion.org and I'll be using it over the next few weeks to close bugs filed against Fedora 8 through 14. Once a week, I'll be taking one version's bugs and closing them with the EXPIRED resolution and adding a comment on the next version's bugs warning that they will be closed a week later. Once we're done with those, it will probably be time to do the same thing to the Fedora 15 bugs. At that point, we'll probably join the Fedora bug triage cycle, doing this every 6 months.
The hardware behind bugzilla.mozilla.org
I recently did up a diagram of how our Bugzilla site was set up, mostly for the benefit of other sysadmins trying to find the various pieces of it. Several folks expressed interest in sharing it with the community just to show an example of how we were set up. So I cleaned it up …Upgrading bugzilla.mozilla.org to version 3.4.3
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 …Continue reading "Upgrading bugzilla.mozilla.org to version 3.4.3"