Status Update

by Dave Miller (justdave)

Introduction and Updates

This Status Update brings with it three new versions of Bugzilla. We have the final release of 2.22, a major feature update to Bugzilla (details below). We are also releasing version 2.20.2, which contains bugfixes and security updates to the 2.20 version series. And last, but not least, Bugzilla 2.23.1, a developer preview release of the codebase that will eventually become either 2.24 or 3.0. There’s a lot of other news about the Bugzilla Project included here, so keep reading!

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.

The End Has Come! (of 2.16.x)

This Status Update represents a major milestone in the life of the Bugzilla Project! We are now dropping all support for the 2.16 version series. Why is this a major milestone? Because it is the longest-lived branch in the entire history of Bugzilla, and frankly, we’re tired of supporting it. :) Bugzilla 2.16 was released just shy of 4 years ago, and that’s a long time in the life of computer software. The only reason it’s lasted so long is because for a couple years we didn’t have anything to replace it with. Bugzilla 2.18 (the version to replace 2.16) has now been out for just over a year, giving most folks plenty of opportunity to upgrade.

Bugzilla has made tremendous progress since 2.16, both in terms of customizability and maintainability. Probably a good 50% of the code has been completely rewritten since then, so although it may look similar to an end user from the web (except for the obvious new features), the back end code looks completely different. The problem with all of this change, of course, is that the current version of Bugzilla is absolutely nothing like version 2.16, which makes it very difficult for us to support 2.16 because anything we backport to it has to be completely rewritten, it won’t just work with minor changes.

So if you are using Bugzilla 2.16.x, this is your last warning. You really need to upgrade if you plan to continue to get security support. We highly recommend version 2.22. Upgrading is easy if you haven’t made a lot of customizations (our upgrade script will upgrade your database schema for you). Not to mention that Bugzilla 2.22 is much more flexible and usable than 2.16. More details on that below.

Integrating with Bugzilla

I recently read a news article that talked about the CEO of Zimbra demonstrating a Zimlet that pulled data about bugs from Bugzilla when you hovered a bug number in their webmail application (among many other things he demonstrated). My first reaction was “hey, way cool!” My second reaction was “How come we didn’t know about that?” I think it’d be really useful for people who are shopping for a bug tracker to be able to see a list of all the things out there that integrate with it. You never know, someone might have already written scripts or extensions to make Bugzilla integrate with other applications they already have, and it might be a key selling point.

We set up a wiki page on the topic a while back, at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Addons, but we haven’t advertised it very well. Have a look at it, and see what’s out there. And if you know of anything that’s not listed, please add it!

New Releases

2.22

Bugzilla 2.22 is a major new feature release of Bugzilla. You can see the list of major new features for details.

In addition to the user-visible features, the code for Bugzilla 2.22 is much cleaner, making it even easier to customize than before. A major new code improvement is that Products, Components, Milestones, Versions, and various other things now have real objects to represent them.

2.20.2

2.20.2 is a bug-fix release for the 2.20 series. Most importantly, users can now log in properly to a brand-new Bugzilla installation, which was broken in Bugzilla 2.20.1. 2.20.2 also includes corrections to the sidebar for admins, a fix for a problem when creating accounts using the “Env” authentication method, a new test for runtests, as well as many smaller fixes and improvements.

This is the last 2.20 release where non-critical bugs will be fixed. 2.20.3 and further will contain only security and dataloss fixes.

2.23.1

This is our completely untested development release. There are a few people using this code successfully in production, but that doesn’t mean it won’t break and destroy everything you have. If you install 2.23.1, you should do so only in a test environment.

Here’s a list of the new features or major changes in this release that are not in 2.22:

• We require at least perl 5.8.0.
• PostgreSQL users must use at least PostgreSQL 8.0.0.
• Custom Fields: 2.23.1 has an extremely basic Custom Fields functionality. They only show up on show_bug.cgi. You create them with the customfield.pl script.
• We’ve re-worked the “Format For Printing” page.
• Emails can now have a header called X-Bugzilla-Who which specifies the Bugzilla account that made the changes. If you want this header, and you are upgrading, you have to reset your newchangedmail parameter to the default.
• Emails also have an X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason header, now. This contains the email address of the person you were watching and why they got the email. If you’re getting the email only because you were watching somebody, the old X-Bugzilla-Reason header will say “None.” If you got an email directly (not through anybody you’re watching), X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason will say “None.”
• Many other email headers were added which give information about the bug. See Bug 70710 for details.
• “Quoted” text in comments is now displayed in a different color from normal comment text.
• You can search for users in many different ways using editusers.cgi, now.
• Comment fields (textareas) now zoom large when you click inside them. If you don’t like this, you can turn it off in your Preferences.
• The “Dependency Tree” view has been redesigned.
• You can now see what changes have been made over time to a user account. (That is, we’ve finally exposed the “profiles_activity” table in the UI.)
• Users who wish to customize or extend Bugzilla can now take advantage of “hooks” at certain areas in the code. (See Bug 298341 for details.)
• Bugzilla supports LDAPS connections in addition to normal LDAP connections.
• You can now change the resolution of a bug without reopening it.
• Administrators can delete attachments.
• The “passwordmail” parameter is now a template instead of a parameter.
• It’s now easy for templates to link to the documentation. (See Bug 316217 for details.)
• We’re in the middle of removing all the global variables from the code. This means eliminating the “versioncache” file. If you notice significant performance differences between 2.22 and 2.23.1 in certain places, please let us know.
• We’re also making a lot of progress on removing functions from globals.pl. Some functions you used in your customizations may have been moved somewhere else.

Bugzilla Meetings

The Bugzilla Project now has 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.

Release of Bugzilla 2.22 (also 2.20.2 and 2.23.1)

by Bugzilla Team

The Bugzilla Project is proud to announce the official release of Bugzilla 2.22. Bugzilla 2.22 is a major new feature release for Bugzilla, containing a large number of bug fixes and enhancements, including complete PostgreSQL support, UTF-8 support, user-impersonation capabilities, and more.

• Download Bugzilla 2.22
• See a list of the New Features in Bugzilla 2.22.
• Read the Release Notes for Bugzilla 2.22 (especially important if you are upgrading).
• Read the latest Status Update to see where the Bugzilla Project is heading and what’s been going on in the last few months!

We are also releasing Bugzilla 2.20.2, a bug-fix release for the 2.20 branch, recommended for all 2.20 branch users.

We also have a development snapshot, Bugzilla 2.23.1, the branch which will someday be released as 2.24 or 3.0. This snapshot is not tested, and should only be installed in a test environment. It’s entirely possible that it contains a bug which will delete your entire bug database. Or, it could be perfectly safe. Since it hasn’t been tested, nobody knows for sure. You Have Been Warned.

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

It’s been quite a few interesting months since our last Status Update, and there have been many interesting things happening in the Bugzilla Project! Thanks to the effort of the Bugzilla team, we’re releasing our first Release Candidate for 2.22, which has been tested by QA and we think is pretty stable! We also have a huge number of bug-fixes in 2.20.1, making the very-stable 2.20 even better. Finally, we have some security fixes the 2.18 and 2.16 branches.

The future of the Bugzilla Project looks good. We have some good plans for Bugzilla development that you can read all about below.

Oh, and if you’re using 2.16, remember that there won’t be any more security fixes for that branch after we release the final version of 2.22, which will happen very soon. That means that 2.16 will be completely “dead,” so upgrade as soon as possible!

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

2.22rc1

This is our first Release Candidate of 2.22. It’s gone through QA Testing with our new Bugzilla QA Team, so we think it’s fairly stable. However, it hasn’t received a lot of wide-scale testing yet, so it should still only be used in testing environments.

However, we do encourage you to heavily test this release! We really think our next release will be 2.22 final, and it’s your feedback that will determine if that’s the case.

Since this is a Release Candidate, we also now have release notes for the 2.22 series. You can read them to see what new features and bug fixes we have in the 2.22 series.

2.20.1

Bugzilla 2.20 was one of our most stable releases ever, thanks to our QA Team. However, we still managed to fix many, many bugs for the 2.20.1 release. This is probably the most bugs we’ve ever fixed for a point release. Basically, the 2.20 series is now even more polished than it was when we first released it.

We’re aware of very few significant issues remaining on the 2.20 branch, which is good since it will likely go into “lockdown” mode with the release of 2.22. That is, only security and dataloss bugs will be fixed on the 2.20 branch after we release 2.22.

If you want to know some of the major things we fixed for 2.20.1, you can read the release notes. If you want to see everything we fixed, you can use the status changes page to see all the patches we’ve checked in on the 2.20 branch since the release of 2.20.

2.18.5 and 2.16.11

These are both just security fix releases. You can read the Security Advisory to see what we fixed.

Note that this is very likely to be the last 2.16 release, unless we do any further security fixes for the 2.16 branch along with the final 2.22 release.

Trunk Re-opens

With the release of 2.22rc1, we have branched 2.22 development, and the trunk is now open! We plan to have the trunk open for a while this time, you can read about that in the “roadmap” section below.

Anyhow, this means go ahead and start hacking away! We have many great things lined up to check in right now, such as the beginnings of custom fields. Our next release should be great.

Bugzilla Meetings

The Bugzilla Project now has 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.

Bugzilla 3.0: The Roadmap

So, we would very much like our next release of Bugzilla to be called 3.0. In our very first Bugzilla Meeting, we decided that the three critical features we would have to have for that would be:

• mod_perl support
• Custom Fields
• Better Skins

As such, those are our three primary goals right now. However, some other interesting things should be getting into 3.0 as well.

We have not yet decided to break any backwards-compatibility for 2.x users. 2.x users will definitely be able to upgrade to 3.0, no matter what we decide. However, if anybody would like to propose any backward-incompatible changes, now is the time!

To help plan our development, LpSolit (Frederic Buclin) drafted a Bugzilla Roadmap and we revised it during our first Bugzilla Meeting. Check it out, it shows where we’re going and what our plans are, and it’s very up-to-date.

If you want to add something to the roadmap, attend one of our Bugzilla Meetings and make your suggestion.

Anything added to the roadmap needs somebody who can work on it. Although we’d certainly love every feature in the world to make it into 3.0, we only have a certain number of developers, and they only have a certain amount of time! That means that if you don’t have the time to code an enhancement, don’t suggest adding it to the roadmap (unless you can convince somebody else to work on it).

As you can see from the roadmap, we’re expecting our next release to be in September. Yes, that’s a long ways from now, but we’d like to call it 3.0, so we’re giving it a bit of extra time. When July rolls around we may consider doing a 2.24, but we’ll have to see how things are, at that time.

Making It Easier to Start Working on Bugzilla

We’ve been engaged in making it easier to start working on Bugzilla, if you’re a new contributor. We have a lot of ideas on how to do this, but we haven’t had time to implement all of them. If you’d like to help make life easier for new developers, come into IRC and ask what you can do to help.

Right now, you can search for bugs that have the string “[Good Intro Bug]” in the Status Whiteboard. These are bugs that Bugzilla Developers think would be good for newcomers to the Bugzilla Project. They’re usually somewhat-simple fixes that will give you an understanding of how Bugzilla works without requiring a lot of in-depth knowledge about Bugzilla.

Release of Bugzilla 2.22rc1, 2.20.1, 2.18.5 and 2.16.11

by Bugzilla Team

The Bugzilla Project is proud to announce our first Release Candidate for Bugzilla 2.22. Bugzilla 2.22 will be a major new feature release for Bugzilla, containing a large number of bug fixes and enhancements, including complete PostgreSQL support, UTF-8 support, user-impersonation capabilities, and many more features. Also see the draft Release Notes for 2.22.

We are also releasing our first bug-fix release for the 2.20 series, 2.20.1. All users of the 2.20 series are highly recommended to upgrade to 2.20.1, as it contains many improvements and fixes to the 2.20 branch.

• Download 2.20.1
• Read the Release Notes.
• See a list of changes between this release and previous versions.

There are also two security releases, 2.18.5 and 2.16.11.

Please note that this is very likely the final release on the 2.16 branch. After Bugzilla 2.22 is released, there will be no more security updates from the Bugzilla Project for the 2.16 branch.

Security Advisory for 2.16.x Shadow Database Users

by Bugzilla Team

We issued a security advisory today for users of the shadow database feature in Bugzilla 2.16.10. Newer versions of Bugzilla are not affected, nor are you affected if you don’t use a shadow database.

Bugzilla T-shirt Available

by Bugzilla Team

We now have a Bugzilla T-shirt available at the Mozilla Store. It’s a great way to support the project and show off your cool taste in bug trackers to your friends! Get yours today!

Status Update

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Introduction and Updates

OK! It’s been a busy few months since our last Status Update, including a lot of work toward the final release of Bugzilla 2.20, and our first release of the 2.21 series, 2.21.1. We are also releasing a bug-fix release for the 2.18 series, 2.18.4. Though the 2.16 branch is still supported (for a short time), there was no 2.16 release required this time around.

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

2.20

At long last, we have released Bugzilla 2.20! 2.20 has all sorts of great new features.

2.20 is our first major release which has not been run on bugzilla.mozilla.org before release. This is because the Mozilla Foundation system administrators have been quite overwhelmed and haven’t been able to do the upgrade. We expect to eventually have 2.20 running on bugzilla.mozilla.org, but it may be a few weeks or months before it happens.

However, it is also our first major release that has been thoroughly tested by the new Bugzilla QA Team, which you can read more about, further down in this Status Update.

Also, many installations have used Bugzilla 2.20rc2, and we had almost no bugs reported against that version, increasing our confidence in the stability of this release.

Upgrading to 2.20

Upgrading to 2.20 is the same as upgrading to any other version of Bugzilla, and you can read the section of the Release Notes called “How to Upgrade From An Older Bugzilla” for instructions.

In particular, remember to read through all the Release Notes, from the version you are upgrading from to the version that you are upgrading to. Certain new features require manual changes if you would like to use them. And, if you have customized your Bugzilla, sometimes there are manual changes you must make to be sure that your customizations stay around.

PostgreSQL Support in 2.20

One of the most-requested features of Bugzilla has been the ability to support other databases, and so 2.20 is the first official release to support a database other than MySQL. The first database that we are supporting other than MySQL is PostgreSQL. Though support for PostgreSQL is marked as “experimental” in 2.20, most of the features do work.

Also included in Bugzilla 2.20 is a script to copy a Bugzilla database between MySQL and PostgreSQL, contrib/bzdbcopy.pl. You can read the file itself for instructions, but just remember that your PostgreSQL Bugzilla installation and your MySQL Bugzilla installation have to be identical versions of Bugzilla in order for it to work.

Particular thanks goes out to Max Kanat-Alexander, Tomáš Kopal, various PostgreSQL users, and all the Bugzilla reviewers for making PostgreSQL support a reality.

2.21.1

We’ve been doing some large code re-organization for 2.21.1, making Bugzilla even easier to customize. In particular, Async Open Source has contributed significant changes to the way that we handle products, components, versions, milestones, and classifications in the code, which simplify the code for both customizers and core Bugzilla developers.

There are quite a few nice enhancements in 2.21.1, including:

• The ability to do relative date searches by hour, in addition to days and other units of time.
• “Alias” added to the New Bug form, for those who can edit the alias.
• Added a user preference for whether or not to go to the next bug in your list after submitting changes to a bug.
• Users can now actually access flag descriptions.
• Bugzilla will optionally convert BMP attachments into PNGs for you.
• The CGI.pl file is entirely gone.
• You can now edit the Status Whiteboard when you are changing multiple bugs at once.
• The move.pl script’s functionality has been merged into process_bug.cgi.
• QuickSearch is now in perl instead of in JavaScript.
• There is now limited ability for multiple different projects to share one Bugzilla codebase with different data stores.
• New Bugzilla installations will use UTF-8 encoding for all pages.
• The way that groups work in the database has changed, and large-scale Bugzilla use should be much faster, as a result.
• The actual attachment data has been moved to a separate database table, separate from the attachments table. This should greatly improve searches on attachment information not related to the attachment contents.
• You can now specify multiple emails, comma-separated, when setting the requestee of a flag.
• “Bug Creation Time” is now available in the Boolean Charts.

2.18.4

This release fixes a few bugs reported to us, in addition to fixing one security issue.

This is the last 2.18 release where we considered non-critical bugs. All future releases on the 2.18 branch will fix only security or dataloss issues.

The QA Team

One of the new developments in the Bugzilla world is the Bugzilla QA Team, headed by Frederic Buclin (aka “LpSolit”). They have been doing detailed tests on our major releases, before we release them, to make sure that all our major features work.

Our QA team is composed entirely of volunteers – if you’d like to help out, contact LpSolit on IRC (irc.mozilla.org) in the #qa-bugzilla channel or by email. Helping out with Bugzilla QA is a great, easy way to contribute to the Bugzilla Project.

Release Schedules

Our 2.20 release was behind schedule, but that was somewhat expected. As an Open Source project, we rely totally on volunteer efforts to release a version, and so sometimes we can’t have hard release schedules. We freeze the development tree every six months, but how long it takes to release after that depends on a lot of factors, mostly how much development we did in those six months, and thus how many bugs we find and fix during the freeze.

One thing that contributed to the extended delay of the 2.20 release is that we allowed some new feature development even after the freeze, and also that our development time total on 2.20 was longer than six months. We expect our next release, 2.22, to be quicker to release, as we’ve had less time to develop on it. And future releases should stick more and more to our freeze schedule.

Per our standard six-month plan, the 2.22 branch would have been frozen on September 15. However, we couldn’t freeze a 2.22 without having 2.20 released. Currently, the plan is to freeze 2.22 one month after the release of 2.21.1. That way, we have some time to react to feedback on the 2.21 series, but we won’t be extending the 2.22 release indefinitely.

Hopefully, then, within three months after the freeze for 2.22, we will have a release. Hopefully, we’ll have it even sooner than that, but as I said, it’s hard to determine that sometimes, with volunteer efforts.

If you’d like to see faster Bugzilla releases, the best way is to come help out, yourself! To get started contributing to Bugzilla, you can read the Contributor’s Guide and the Developer’s Guide.

Oracle Support

Oracle themselves are working with the Bugzilla team on porting Bugzilla to Oracle. We hope to have workable Oracle support by the release of Bugzilla 2.24. If you’d like to keep track of how it’s going, CC yourself on the Oracle support tracking bug.

If you would like to help port Bugzilla to Oracle or any other database, feel free to contact the developers list ([email protected]). Porting Bugzilla to a new database system is usually easy, since we have a whole infrastructure in place for it.

The Status of Bugzilla 2.16

Bugzilla 2.16 has been locked-down to security fixes only for a long time. Starting with the release of Bugzilla 2.22, Bugzilla 2.16 will no longer be supported at all by the Bugzilla Project. We encourage all Bugzilla administrators to upgrade to Bugzilla 2.20 as soon as possible.

Trunk Checkins Since the Last Status Update

You can see a list of all recent changes to Bugzilla code using the table on our detailed changes page.

Release of Bugzilla 2.20 (also 2.21.1 and 2.18.4)

by Bugzilla Team

We are proud to announce the release of Bugzilla 2.20, a major new feature release for Bugzilla. Bugzilla 2.20 includes a large number of major new features, and hundreds of small enhancements and bug fixes over Bugzilla 2.18.

• Download Bugzilla 2.20
• See the new features in 2.20.
• Read the Release Notes for Bugzilla 2.20. (This is particularly important if you are upgrading from an older version.)
• See a list of changes between your version of Bugzilla and the current version.

We also have two other releases, a security fix for the 2.18 series, (Bugzilla 2.18.4),and our latest development snapshot (Bugzilla 2.21.1).

For details on all the releases, see our new, very detailed Status Update.

All of these releases fix security flaws discovered in older versions of Bugzilla. For details, read the Security Advisory.

There is no release on the Bugzilla 2.16 branch, because it was not affected by any of the security issues. 2.16 users should note that support for 2.16 will be totally discontinued with the release of Bugzilla 2.22, and so they are encouraged to ugprade to Bugzilla 2.20 as soon as possible.

Release of Bugzilla 2.20rc2

by Bugzilla Team

We are proud to announce the second Release Candidate of Bugzilla 2.20, a major new feature release for Bugzilla.

• Download 2.20rc2
• See the New Features in 2.20.
• Read the proposed Release Notes for Bugzilla 2.20.
• See a detailed list of changes between your version of Bugzilla and 2.20rc2.

Bugzilla 2.20rc2 is recommended to be used for testing purposes only. The final release of Bugzilla 2.20 will be shaped by your feedback over the next few weeks.

You can see a list of still-open bugs that we mean to fix before the final release of Bugzilla 2.20.

For those who want a stable version of Bugzilla, we recommend Bugzilla 2.18.x.

Release of Bugzilla 2.18.3

by Bugzilla Team

There was a bug in 2.18.2 that caused users to be unable to use the Search page, and possibly other pages as well.

This has been fixed with our release of 2.18.3:

• Download Bugzilla 2.18.3
• Read the Release Notes for 2.18.3