BMO/40Upgrade/Alpha

Subject: Mozilla Bugzilla 4.0 Upgrade Testing Announcement - April 16th, 2011

Greetings,

Following on the heels of another popular 4.0 release happening currently, the Mozilla Bugzilla team is happy to announce the first test release of the next version of Bugzilla based on the upstream 4.0 code base.

We are hoping to have the upgrade completed by April 16th, 2011. Please let us know if that date will have any negative impact on development schedules.

For more detailed project information as well as the full schedule, see: https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/40Upgrade

Please test drive at: https://bugzilla-stage-tip.mozilla.org

Over the years Mozilla has made substantial customizations to Bugzilla to help streamline Engineering processes. Over time the upstream has incorporated some of these customizations or solved them in different ways. Upgrading still reduces our customization footprint (and thus maintenance) while bringing many bug fixes & enhancements. In our current code, most of the customizations are directly in the Bugzilla code itself. With the new 4.0 BMO release, most of the customizations were moved to a new BMO Bugzilla extension. This will help with future upgrade efforts.

The main area of focus for our test releases are stability. Functionality that currently works in our 3.6 code base should continue to work as expected in the new version 4.0. Please let us know of any customizations that are missing as well.

In addition to basic functionality and stability, some new features added by the Mozilla Bugzilla team for 4.0 that are ready for testing and feedback:

Splinter: The Splinter patch review system as been revamped and will be enabled at the time of 4.0 release. It has been rewritten as a Bugzilla extension and accesses Bugzilla data directly so there is no longer a need for use of the webservices API. It has also been converted from jQuery to YUI. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570786

SecureMail: The SecureMail Bugzilla extension has been included in the BMO 4.0 code and will also be enabled for the rollout of 4.0. This will allow for email notifications for specific secure bugs to be encrypted before being delivered. Users will need to upload their S/MIME certificates or public PGP keys to Bugzilla so they can decrypt the Bugzilla emails. Otherwise the email will only include limited information. More information on this feature can be viewed at https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/SecureBugMail.

Component Watching: Currently BMO only allows for watching of particular user accounts. Users of BMO would like to also be able to receive bug notifications on bugs assigned specific Bugzilla field values such as components. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=634531

Splinter, SecureMail, and Component Watching are currently undergoing security reviews by the Mozilla Security Team.

• Note*: Once the security reviews have been completed we will be able to open the testing up to external users as well. Currently you will require a permitted LDAP account to access the test instance.

Other features we are currently working on and hoping to have available for the 4.0 release:

Pulse: The Pulse Bugzilla extension will send messages to a message broker via AMQP or STOMP whenever an object (bug, keyword, component, etc) is created or modified. Application developers can then monitor the AMQP server for changes they are interested in. For more information, please see https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO/Pulse.

SiteMap: The SiteMap Bugzilla extension will allow various search engines to index bugs in BMO. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223988

There are numerous other changes behind the scenes that we haven't listed. The goal is to make sure that functionality that people have come to expect in 3.6 is still possible in the new system.

Please feel free to point your various scripts and third party applications that use the XMLRPC/JSON API at the test server to make sure they continue to function properly.

There are also numerous new features/fixes that are part of the upstream version 4.0. Some more notable updates include enhanced WebService support, UI enhancements, automatic duplicate detection, enhanced custom field functionality, autocomplete for users, and search improvements. For more detailed information on what has changed since the last upstream release, check out the full release notes page at http://www.bugzilla.org/releases/4.0/release-notes.html

The database is a recent snapshot of the live database so should be useful for testing to make sure the information is displayed properly and changeable. Also with a full snapshot it is possible to test for any performance related issues.

• Note*: Email has been disabled so that unnecessary spam is not sent out. So feel free to make changes to bugs to verify proper working order. We realize this may make it difficult to fully test some of the features of Bugzilla and we are working on a suitable solution.

We are asking for everyone to get involved as much as possible with testing and feedback on all of the test releases to help us make this the most robust and stable roll out as possible.

Please file any enhancement requests or bug reports in the production Bugzilla system at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mozilla.org&component=Bugzilla:+Other+b.m.o+Issues

Thanks, The Mozilla Bugzilla Team https://wiki.mozilla.org/BMO