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23. August 2007

Release of Bugzilla 3.0.1, 3.1.1, 2.22.3, and 2.20.5

by Bugzilla Team

Today the Bugzilla project has four releases!

3.0.1

Bugzilla 3.0.1 is the first bug-fix release for the 3.0 series. 3.0 was very stable, but 3.0.1 adds a lot of little polish fixes that greatly improve the experience of using Bugzilla.

3.1.1

Bugzilla 3.1.1 is our first development release toward Bugzilla 3.2. It has a huge number of new features, but is extremely unstable. It has not been tested, and should not be used in a production environment. It may fail in critical ways, or destroy your data. However, it is useful as a feature preview and for testing purposes.

2.22.3 and 2.20.5

Bugzilla 2.22.3 and Bugzilla 2.20.5 are security-fix and critical bug-fix releases for the 2.22 and 2.20 series. If you are using any 2.22 or 2.20 version, we strongly recommend you update to these versions.

Security Advisory

All four releases also contain security fixes, and so you should definitely update if you want your installation to remain secure. Read the Security Advisory for more details.

09. May 2007

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

After quite a bit of work, we’ve released Bugzilla 3.0! You can go read the release announcement for more details.

There’s also various other interesting news in Bugzilla land, see below for details.

About Bugzilla 3.0

Bugzilla 3.0 is very stable–we’ve had a long stabilizing cycle, 3.0rc1 got a lot of testing, and this release has been through our extensive QA process.

It has lots of new features. And, of course, we think you should read the release notes, because hey, they’re really useful! (And I spent a lot of time working on them!) (They’re even in HTML now, which is pretty cool.)

Future Releases

We’ve already done a lot of hacking away in terms of rearchitecture and adding new features toward 3.1, so 3.2 should be a very exciting release.

In general, having a good QA process has made us have to release far fewer bug-fix releases. The 2.22 series has been extremely stable, and so we expect the 3.0 series to be extremely stable as well.

Roadmap for Bugzilla 3.2

We have a roadmap for Bugzilla 3.2 that goes over the major new features we’d like to implement for 3.2. As you can see, there are a lot of new features there, and we’d love any help that we can get!

Development Schedule for 3.2

By our standard schedule, development for Bugzilla 3.2 enters a “soft freeze” on August 21 (where we don’t accept new feature patches, but we will work on finishing up bugs that we currently have in progress), and a “hard freeze” (where we don’t accept any new features) on September 4.

The more contributors we get, particularly in the area of Release and QA, the faster we can get this release out when it’s ready!

EOL of Bugzilla 2.18

We sent out the EOL announcement for Bugzilla 2.18, so users of Bugzilla 2.18 or 2.18.x should now all know that there won’t be any new releases in the 2.18 series, even if there are security bugs discovered in a 2.18 release.

We recommend that all Bugzilla 2.18 users upgrade to 3.0, at their earliest convenience. Upgrade instructions are in the Bugzilla 3.0 Release Notes.

Updated “Features” Page

For a while, the features page had been out-of-date, reflecting the features of Bugzilla 2.18. Now it’s fully up-to-date with all of the features of Bugzilla 3.0, and it’s pretty impressive! If you need help “selling” Bugzilla at your organization, feel free to point people at the updated features page!

T-Shirt for 3000th Announce List Subscriber

We sent a free Bugzilla t-shirt to the 3000th subscriber to our announcement list, Rich Gibbs. 3000 subscribers to the announce list shows a huge increase in the number of subscribers in just the past year. Despite there being more and more bug-trackers on the market, Bugzilla is still gaining in popularity!

Stay Updated About Bugzilla

As usual, we’d like to remind all Bugzilla administrators that to assist them in keeping up-to-date with release announcements and security advisories, we provide an ultra-low-volume administrator mailing list ([email protected]). We advise all Bugzilla administrators to subscribe so they can keep up with important Bugzilla announcements.

Those looking to get involved with Bugzilla development may want to consider joining the developers list ([email protected]). This list offers discussion on new features and issues. Developers are invited to subscribe to the list. You may also want to read our Contributor’s Guide.

Bugzilla Meetings

Come to our meetings every month! Anybody is welcome to attend who is interested in helping out with the Bugzilla Project, or just anybody who wants to put in their two cents on how development should go.

You can learn more about the meetings at the wiki page about Bugzilla Meetings.

09. May 2007

Release of Bugzilla 3.0!

by Bugzilla Team

In 1998, the first open-source version of Bugzilla, 2.0, was released to the world without much fanfare, just this little post on the netscape.public.mozilla.announce newsgroup.

Nine years later, Bugzilla is used by thousands of companies around the world with millions of total users. It has become the de-facto standard in open-source bug tracking. Thousands of companies have moved away from their costly commercial bug-tracking systems to Bugzilla, usually finding Bugzilla more flexible and more full-featured than the system they’d been paying thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for, and proving that open source software really can produce a competitive product.

Today, the Bugzilla Project is extremely proud to announce the release of Bugzilla 3.0, and just like Terry said in 1998, “We like the new version much better, and hope you will too.”

Here’s just a sampling of the major new features in version 3.0:

  • Custom Fields
  • mod_perl support for greatly-improved performance
  • Per-Product Permissions
  • XML-RPC Interface
  • Create and Modify Bugs by Email
  • and much, much more…

Bugzilla 3.0 also has a much-improved code base over previous versions of Bugzilla. Improvements are still happening, but long-time customizers and coders of Bugzilla will notice significant improvements. And if you haven’t seen Bugzilla code since 2.16 or so, prepare to be (pleasantly) surprised!

As always, we welcome open source contributors to Bugzilla, which is made entirely by volunteers around the world. You too can be part of the team that makes a product used by thousands of people daily.

26. February 2007

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

Today we’ve released the first Release Candidate for Bugzilla 3.0! This has been fairly well-tested, since the code is running on bugzilla.mozilla.org and it’s also been fully tested by our QA Team.

Localizers: Now is a good time to start translating templates for Bugzilla 3.0! We’re going to freeze the templates as much as possible between now and the final release of 3.0, so if you translate the templates for rc1, you’ll easily have a 3.0 translation.

About Bugzilla 3.0rc1

The best place to find out about the release is the release notes, which are now in HTML and linked from the front page of every installation by default.

Provided all goes well with RC1, we expect to release the final version of Bugzilla 3.0 within a few weeks. If you find any important bugs that you think should prevent release of Bugzilla 3.0, please file them and put a “?” in the blocking3.0 flag.

Plugins!

One thing we’d really like to see for Bugzilla 3.0 is some plugins! Bugzilla 3.0 has a lot of ways to write plugins, and if it doesn’t support what you want to do with your plugin, we’d be happy to add hooks for you. Right now we don’t have a standard place to store plugins, but if you make one, link it from the Bugzilla Addons page, and then tell us on the developers mailing list.

Also, if you know of any Bugzilla addons (or any other product that interacts with Bugzilla) that aren’t listed on that page, please add them!

What’s Going on with the Bugzilla Project?

This is the little section where we tell you about the development team and new news about the actual development process.

We’re just about to start work on our roadmap for Bugzilla 3.2, which will control our development for the next 6-9 months. We have a draft roadmap up now.

Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat) and Frédéric Buclin (LpSolit) now have the power to approve bugs for checkin, meaning that there are now four “approvers” (including justdave and myk).

We have some plans to make it even easier to contribute to Bugzilla! Stay tuned to www.bugzilla.org for details.

Upcoming EOL for Bugzilla 2.18

Users of Bugzilla 2.18 should be aware that it will reach End-Of-Life with the final release of Bugzilla 3.0. Once Bugzilla 3.0 is released, no new patches will be released for Bugzilla 2.18, even for security issues.

We recommend that all Bugzilla 2.18 users upgrade to 2.22.2 (or 3.0, when it comes out) at their earliest convenience.

Stay Updated About Bugzilla

As usual, we’d like to remind all Bugzilla administrators that to assist them in keeping up-to-date with release announcements and security advisories, we provide an ultra-low-volume administrator mailing list ([email protected]). We advise all Bugzilla administrators to subscribe so they can keep up with important Bugzilla announcements.

Those looking to get involved with Bugzilla development may want to consider joining the developers list ([email protected]). This list offers discussion on new features and issues. Developers are invited to subscribe to the list. You may also want to read our Contributor’s Guide.

Bugzilla Meetings

Come to our meetings every other week! Anybody is welcome to attend who is interested in helping out with the Bugzilla Project, or just anybody who wants to put in their two cents on how development should go.

You can learn more about the meetings at the wiki page about Bugzilla Meetings.

26. February 2007

Release of Bugzilla 3.0rc1

by Bugzilla Team

We’ve released our first Release Candidate of Bugzilla 3.0, Bugzilla 3.0rc1! This is a major step towards our final release, and with your help we should be able to release Bugzilla 3.0 by April.

What help do we need? Report bugs! The whole purpose of Release Candidates is to really shake out any remaining bugs that we haven’t found, so if you find one, make sure that you file it!

We also have a new Status Update for you, so you can find out what’s going on with the Bugzilla Project!

02. February 2007

Release of Bugzilla 2.22.2, 2.20.4, and 2.23.4

by Bugzilla Team

Bugzilla 2.22.2 is a bug-fix and security release:

We also released Bugzilla 2.20.4, a security-fix release for the 2.20 series.

Finally, you can use Bugzilla 2.23.4 in your testing environments. 2.23.4 is fairly stable, since it’s currently running on bugzilla.mozilla.org, but it still hasn’t gone through QA yet, so it may have unfound critical issues.

There is a Security Advisory for all three releases. Please read it, particularly if you were using 2.23.3.

15. October 2006

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

Well, we have a whole bunch of releases out today, all the way from 2.18.6 to 2.23.3.

  • 2.18.6 and 2.20.3 are primarily security fix releases.
  • 2.22.1 is our first bug-fix release for the 2.22 series, containing many useful fixes. We recommend everybody upgrade to 2.22.1 as soon as possible.
  • 2.23.3 is one of our most important development releases ever, containing the two “holy grails” of Bugzilla development, custom fields and mod_perl support. (Of course, the release is only a development snapshot, so don’t use it in production! It hasn’t received the same level of QA as the other releases!)

Bugzilla development has been extremely active lately, and we’re happy that we’re receiving so many contributions. As usual, though, we need more reviewers! To become a reviewer, you first have to be a consistent contributor, and then we have to trust your judgement. You can see more details at the List of Reviewers.

Stay Updated About Bugzilla

As usual, we’d like to remind all Bugzilla administrators that to assist them in keeping up-to-date with release announcements and security advisories, we provide an ultra-low-volume administrator mailing list ([email protected]). We advise all Bugzilla administrators to subscribe so they can keep up with important Bugzilla announcements.

Those looking to get involved with Bugzilla development may want to consider joining the developers list ([email protected]). This list offers discussion on new features and issues. Developers are invited to subscribe to the list. You may also want to read our Contributor’s Guide.

About Our Latest Development Release (2.23.3)

This tops 2.23.2 as one of our most feature-packed development releases ever. However, it is not strongly QA-tested, so use it at your own risk! We don’t recommend using it in a production environment. We know there are bugs in it.

Here’s a listing of some of the major improvements and changes since 2.23.2:

  • Custom Resolutions: You can now customize the list of resolutions for bugs.
  • Shared Queries: You can share saved queries with a group of users.
  • Custom Fields: Administrators can add plain-text and drop-down custom fields to Bugzilla. Note that you can search these fields using the Boolean Charts at the bottom of the search page.
  • mod_perl: Bugzilla can now run under mod_perl. See lower in this Status Update for more details.
  • XML-RPC: This version of Bugzilla has the beginnings of an XML-RPC interface. Note that the XML-RPC API is not yet stable, and may change before the release of Bugzilla 3.0. However, any documented function is likely to stay the same in the actual release as it is now.
  • Skins: Bugzilla is now skinnable. See the documentation for details.
  • You can now specify a Default CC for a component.
  • You can now disable Bugzilla’s sending of email to a particular user, in the administrative interface.
  • There’s a parameter for administrators to put an announcement at the top of all Bugzilla pages.
  • You can make a bug ASSIGNED when you file it, now.
  • If you aren’t allowed to change a field on a bug, it will look like plain text instead of a form element.
  • All of Bugzilla’s emails are now in templates.
  • Some of the messages printed out during installation can now be localized.
  • If you are using Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7, you can install a Search Plugin that will let you search Bugzilla bugs.

Also, the following changes may interest developers or customizers of Bugzilla:

  • When you build the documentation, the Bugzilla POD documentation will be available as docs/html/api/ in your installation. The POD describes all of the internal functions of Bugzilla. It’s very useful for customizers and developers of Bugzilla. It also explains how a few scripts work, like checksetup.pl, and that information is useful to all administrators of Bugzilla.
  • checksetup.pl has been completely reorganized into modules in the Bugzilla::Install namespace. It also has POD now, so you can do perldoc checksetup.pl to see all kinds of useful information about it.
  • Bugzilla::Object now has many more abilities, including the ability to create and update objects in the database.
  • You may notice a huge cleanup in post_bug.cgi and the creation of Bugzilla::Bug->create.
  • localconfig variables are now accessed through Bugzilla->localconfig.
  • UserInGroup has been removed. You should use Bugzilla->user->in_group instead.

mod_perl Support

Bugzilla now can be run under mod_perl. This allows for pages to load much faster (up to six times faster) than they did previously. However, it uses up much more memory than Bugzilla did previously. So if you’re going to use it, make sure that you have enough memory available, around 1.5GB.

We’d really like some testing of Bugzilla under mod_perl! We know that some things don’t work under mod_perl yet. You can see that at the tracking bug and its dependency list.

For more details, see the documentation.

The Road to Bugzilla 3.0

Bugzilla development freezes two weeks after today, meaning that no new enhancements will be accepted–we’ll focus on fixing bugs. We then hope to have Bugzilla 3.0rc1 out by the end of the year, and the final Bugzilla 3.0 by early 2007.

To see our current plans, you can watch the Bugzilla Calendar. It reflects only our current plans–it may change at any time.

Upcoming EOL for Bugzilla 2.18

Users of Bugzilla 2.18 should be aware that it will reach End-Of-Life with the final release of Bugzilla 3.0. Once Bugzilla 3.0 is released, no new patches will be released for Bugzilla 2.18, even for security issues.

We recommend that all Bugzilla 2.18 users upgrade to 2.22.1 (or 3.0, when it comes out) at their earliest convenience.

Bugzilla Meetings

Come to our meetings every other week! Anybody is welcome to attend who is interested in helping out with the Bugzilla Project, or just anybody who wants to put in their two cents on how development should go.

You can learn more about the meetings at the wiki page about Bugzilla Meetings.

15. October 2006

Release of Bugzilla 2.18.6, 2.20.3, 2.22.1, and 2.23.3

by Bugzilla Team

We have many releases for you, today:

  • Bugzilla 2.18.6 and Bugzilla 2.20.3 are security-fix releases for our older branches. (Bugzilla 2.20.3 also contains some non-security bug fixes.)
  • Bugzilla 2.22.1 is our first bug-fix release in the 2.22 series, and contains many useful fixes that improve the experience of using Bugzilla.
  • Finally, we are releasing an unstable development snapshot, Bugzilla 2.23.3. This snapshot has both custom fields and mod_perl support, but has not been tested as thoroughly as our other releases. The 2.23 series will eventually culminate in Bugzilla 3.0.

Also, read our latest Status Update to find out what’s going on with the Bugzilla Project, and learn about all the new features in our latest development snapshot!

Users of the 2.18.x series should note that 2.18.x will reach End Of Life when Bugzilla 3.0 is released. There are more details in the Status Update.

09. July 2006

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

Today we released a development snapshot only. We’ve done a lot of coding on the trunk, and we wanted to get out a new version to be tested. Most of the branches (2.18, 2.20, and 2.22) are pretty stable, so they don’t urgently need a release at this time. We may be coming out with some bug fix releases for those in the coming months, though.

As usual, we’d like to remind all Bugzilla administrators that to assist them in keeping up-to-date with release announcements and security advisories, we provide an ultra-low-volume administrator mailing list ([email protected]). We advise all Bugzilla administrators to subscribe so they can keep up with important Bugzilla announcements.

Those looking to get involved with Bugzilla development may want to consider joining the developers list ([email protected]). This list offers discussion on new features and issues. Developers are invited to subscribe to the list. You may also want to read our Contributor’s Guide.

New Releases

2.23.2

In my totally biased opinion, this is a really exciting release. We’ve made some major changes to certain parts of the Bugzilla code, and we’re getting close to some major overall improvements.

However, it is totally untested, so use it at your own risk! We don’t recommend using it in a production environment.

Here’s a listing of some of the major improvements and changes since 2.23.1:

  • A new user preference to automatically put you on the CC list of any bug that you change.
  • The Summary field is now limited to 255 characters. Summaries longer than that will be truncated, with the original preserved in a comment, when you upgrade.
  • The “whinemail” parameter is now instead contained in a template.
  • Automatic Update Notification: Bugzilla can notify you (the administrator) automatically, on the front page, when there is a new release of Bugzilla. See the upgrade_notification parameter.
  • There is now navigation at the top of each page in addition to the bottom.
  • The UI at the top of each page has been generally improved.
  • You can now add an attachment to a bug when you are filing it!
  • checksetup.pl now displays the version of Bugzilla and the version of perl you are using.

In addition, there are a lot of changes that developers, customizers, or packagers of Bugzilla would be interested in:

  • The data formerly stored as the :locations section of Bugzilla::Config is now inside of Bugzilla::Constants. This is particularly important for packagers of Bugzilla.
  • CheckCanChangeField() has been moved from process_bug.cgi into Bugzilla/Bug.pm, and is now called check_can_change_field.
  • The entire Bugzilla::Auth structure has been entirely re-written. It should be easier to write authentication plugins for Bugzilla now. If you’re interested in writing one, just read the documentation on it by typing perldoc Bugzilla::Auth from inside your Bugzilla directory.
  • SendSQL() and all of its companion functions (including SqlQuote()) have been entirely eliminated from Bugzilla. The correct way to access the database now is to use DBI.
  • globals.pl is gone. All functions have been moved into modules in the Bugzilla/ directory.
  • Bugzilla no longer uses the data/versioncache file. If you notice any performance problems because of this, please let us know.
  • The Param() function now only exists in templates. Normal CGIs and scripts now use Bugzilla->params to access Bugzilla’s parameters. This also means most scripts don’t need to use Bugzilla::Config anymore.
  • There is a new Bugzilla::Object class that makes writing new objects even easier. See Bugzilla/Keyword.pm for an example.
  • The code for actually sending an email (MessageToMTA()) has moved into Bugzilla::Mailer.
  • There is now a Bugzilla->request_cache for storing variables that should live throughout an entire request. (For example, what used to be $Bugzilla::_cgi is now Bugzilla->request_cache->{cgi}.)

The Road to mod_perl

For many, many years, we have been working toward having Bugzilla support mod_perl, which would be a huge performance improvement.

Well, after a multi-year effort by almost every developer on the Project, we are almost there!

We should soon have a version of Bugzilla in CVS that supports mod_perl. If you’re interested, watch the mod_perl bug and its blockers. If you have any questions about mod_perl support, feel free to come into IRC and ask mkanat, if he’s around. Some other developers may be able to help you, also.

Bugzilla Meetings

Come to our meetings every other week! Anybody is welcome to attend who is interested in helping out with the Bugzilla Project, or just anybody who wants to put in their two cents on how development should go.

You can learn more about the meetings at the wiki page about Bugzilla Meetings.

09. July 2006

Release of Bugzilla 2.23.2

by Bugzilla Team

Today we have a new development snapshot for you, Bugzilla 2.23.2. It has a lot of improvements and changes since 2.23.1, so we wanted to get it out and get it tested!

However, remember that this is a development release, and so it has not been thoroughly tested. You should only use it in a testing environment!