Bugzilla Upgrade Scheduled For August 15-16

[Max Kanat-Alexander <mkanat everythingsolved com>]

	Hello GNOME Developers and Bug Triagers! The code work for the Bugzilla 
3.4 upgrade is complete, and after conferring with the infrastructure 
team and the release team, we've set the date of the upgrade for 
Saturday, August 15. I expect there to be roughly six hours of downtime 
if everything goes well, starting at 9:00am Pacific time (that's 16:00 
UTC). However, if anything goes wrong (and I don't expect it to--I've 
already done several test upgrades), Bugzilla may possibly be down for 
the entire weekend.

	There is now a test server containing the data from bugzilla.gnome.org 
as of about a week ago:

	http://bugzilla-test.gnome.org/

	Email is off on this installation, so you can play with it to your 
heart's content. It does not affect the actual bugzilla.gnome.org when 
you make changes on this server.

	You should find the new server to be faster for every operation than 
the old server. If you spot any performance problems, please report them 
by sending me an email.

	Please test this and report any bugs that you find! The best way to 
report bugs at this point would just be to send me an email directly. 
The user interface and feature set are pretty much fixed at this point, 
so UI feedback cannot be acted upon until after the upgrade (unless it's 
very minor tweaks). It would probably be best to stick to just bug 
reports for now, in terms of feedback. If UI changes are desired or 
required, bugs can be filed for them after the upgrade is complete. 
(Preferably, if you want UI changes to Bugzilla, we'd like your help to 
do them upstream, at bugzilla.org, not as local customizations to 
bugzilla.gnome.org.)

	It's particularly important to make sure that any Unicode data that you 
have placed in Bugzilla is correctly displayed in this test instance, 
because some of it (like comments) cannot be fixed very easily after the 
final Bugzilla upgrade.

	Please note that not all features from the old bugzilla.gnome.org have 
been ported forward, only the features that were absolutely necessary to 
perform the upgrade.

	However, there are many new features, some of which are very 
noticeable. For example, there's a "skins" system--check your Preferences.

	The largest "new feature" that is specific to the GNOME Bugzilla is an 
extension for Bugzilla called "traceparser". In the future this will be 
publicly available for all Bugzillas, but at the moment it is specific 
to the GNOME Bugzilla only. This does lots of very interesting things 
with traces:

	* It figures out the "interesting" thread(s) and displays only those 
threads in comments (with a page you can click through to to see the 
full trace).

	* It displays stack traces "prettily", HTML-formatted, in comments. 
(You can click through to see the raw trace.)

	* It hides traces in comments by default, with a button to expand them. 
If you want to always see traces, there is a preference for that in your 
"Preferences" panel.

	* It understands both Python and GDB stack traces.

	* When a user files a bug in the web interface that contains a stack 
trace, if there are similar or identical traces in the system, it offers 
the user the opportunity to CC themselves on one of the bugs containing 
the similar traces instead of continuing to file their bug. If their 
trace is of higher quality than the trace currently on the bug, it will 
also add their trace to the bug.

	* Administrators and triagers can, for specific traces, say that 
certain incoming traces should be *automatically* duped to specific 
bugs, without the user being able to choose. If the bug is closed 
(RESOLVED or VERIFIED), the user will simply receive a message saying 
that they tried to file a duplicate of a closed bug, with a link to the 
bug. If the bug is open, CCs them on the bug and attaches their trace if 
it is of higher quality than the existing trace.

	* There is a report that shows the most popular stack traces submitted.


	If you have any questions about the upgrade in general, feel free to 
respond on the desktop-devel list.

	-Max
--
Max Kanat-Alexander
Chief Engineer
http://www.everythingsolved.com/
Everything Solved: Complete Computer Management