bugzilla.mozilla.org upgrade followup

[Myk Melez]

Friday evening I upgraded bugzilla.mozilla.org (b.m.o) to the latest
version of Bugzilla. The upgrade has given us a number of new features
and important bug fixes. It also caused some regressions which we are
in the process of identifying and fixing.

Read on for more information about the new features. If you have
problems with b.m.o that you think are caused by a new bug in Bugzilla,
check the regressions tracking bug to see if your problem has already
been reported. If it hasn't been, please file a bug and make it block
that one.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=bmo-regressions

While problems with the upgrade are strictly my fault, credit belongs
not only to me but to Bradley Baetz, Gervase Markham, Dave Miller, Joel
Peshkin, Christian Reis, Erik Stambaugh, and all the other members of
the Bugzilla community for adding features, improving stability and
performance, helping me prepare for the upgrade and troubleshooting
problems afterwards. Thanks all.

-myk

Synopis of New Features...

Request Tracker
---------------

The request tracker gives patch authors the ability to ask reviewers for
review through Bugzilla. Requests for review are stored in the Bugzilla
database and displayed in the individual bug reports as well as in a
"request queue" page that shows all (or a filtered subset of) pending
requests. The feature modifies the way attachment statuses work; for
more information see the brief online documentation:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/flag-help.html

User Matching
-------------

You can now enter part of a Bugzilla user's name or email address when
adding them to the cc: list or making them the assignee or QA contact
for a bug. If the string you enter matches multiple users, Bugzilla
will prompt you with a list of users to choose from.

Reporting
---------
(written by Gervase Markham)

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi

Bugzilla has a new mechanism for generating reports of the current state
of the bug database. It has two, related parts: a table-based view, and
a several graphical views.

The table-based view allows you to specify an x, y and z (multiple
tables of data) axis to plot, and then restrict the bugs plotted using
the standard query form. You can take the data as HTML or CSV, for
importing into a spreadsheet. Each number in the HTML version of the
table is linked to a query which produces the list.

So, for example, a Netscape manager could plot assignee vertically, and
severity horizontally, and restrict assignee to the names of his
managees. He would then be able to see which of his managees was
overloaded with severe bugs.

There are also bar, line and pie charts, which are defined in a very
similar way. These views may be more appropriate for particular data
types, and are suitable for saving and then putting into presentations
or web pages.

Note that no attempt is made to prevent you from plotting silly data
sets. For example, if you plot a graph of "assignee" along the X axis,
and choose a line graph, your line won't mean very much.

This feature is in its first revision, so filed bugs and suggestions are
welcome. Also, beware - it hasn't been used on a big site yet, and we
don't know what sort of impact on performance it'll have, but using it
is probably fairly resource-intensive, particularly if the total number
of bugs involved is large. So:
- please add conditions so you are only reporting on bugs you care about
- please don't generate reports just for fun
- please don't generate reports regularly using a cron job
- please don't link to report .PNGs from a web page, but save the images
and mirror them instead.

Example:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi?x_axis_field=bug_status&y_axis_field=component&product=MailNews&cumulate=1&format=table&ctype=html&action=wrap

(You can switch between report types using the controls at the bottom.)

Autolinkification Page
----------------------

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=linkify.html

It's now possible to apply Bugzilla's comment hyperlinking algorithm to
any text you like. This should be useful for status updates and other
web pages which give lists of bugs. The bug links created include the
subject, status and resolution of the bug as a tooltip.

XUL Version of Duplicates Report
--------------------------------

There's a XUL version of the duplicates report. It supports the same
parameters as the HTML version and allows column resizing, reorganizing,
ordering, and hiding as well as a split-pane interface with the list on
top and a iframe for loading bug reports below.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/duplicates.xul

At the moment you need to enable codebase principals by adding the
following line to your prefs.js for the report to work:

user_pref("signed.applets.codebase_principal_support", true);

In the near future we'll make a signed version available at the
following URL that won't require any modifications to your browser:

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/duplicates.jar!/duplicates.xul

Miscellaneous Changes
---------------------

- there are more <link> tags on the links toolbar for navigating quickly
between different areas
- buglists are now available as comma-separated value files (CSV) (link
at the bottom)
- the "guided" bug entry form is now mandatory for users without
confirmation privileges
- you can now enter keywords and dependencies during initial bug entry
- the performance of some queries and CGIs has been improved