01. February 2010

Release of Bugzilla 3.0.11, 3.2.6, 3.4.5, and 3.5.3

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Okay! So we’ve got four releases today! Bugzilla 3.4.5 is a bug-fix release, it’s got some good bug fixes and small improvements. Bugzilla 3.2.6 and 3.0.11 are only fixing a small security issue. Everything released today has security fixes, some of them could actually be important for your installation, depending on how you use Bugzilla. The Security Advisory has details.

We also have a development release, 3.5.3. We’re feature-frozen now, which means that there won’t be any major new features until 3.6 is released, but there still are a lot of bug fixes that need to be done, so it’s not stable yet. Here are some of the new features since 3.5.2:

  • If your Bugzilla is behind a proxy, you can tell it to accept X-Forwarded-For as the end user’s IP address, when the request comes from the proxy.
  • The “Required” parameters section now only lists actually required parameters. Other parameters have been moved to the “General” or “Advanced” section.
  • When installing Bugzilla, the “maintainer” parameter will automatically be set to the admin user you create during checksetup.pl.
  • “votestoconfirm” is now unrelated to the existence of the UNCONFIRMED status in a product. There is instead a checkbox to enable UNCONFIRMED.
  • QuickSearch has had a syntax overhaul to make it much simpler and also able to search more fields. Unfortunately, the documentation for this change didn’t make it into 3.5.3, but it will be in 3.6 at the latest.
  • New WebService function: Bug.fields.
  • The show_bug UI has had a few small changes.
  • The “milestoneurl” feature of a product has been removed.
  • The strings at the top of comments that say that you created or commented on an attachment are now localizable.
  • User accounts are now locked out on a particular IP for 30 minutes if they fail to log in 5 times from that IP.
  • There’s a new “Browse” interface–it’s actually just an updated interface to describecomponents.cgi, but it’s linked from the toolbar as “Browse” now.
  • You can now add attachments to a bug when using email_in.pl.
  • enter_bug.cgi now indicates in the UI which fields are mandatory.
  • mod_perl should be working on Windows now, though it hasn’t received a lot of testing from us.
  • There’s a whole awesome new Extensions system for Bugzilla (see below for more about that).

The New Bugzilla::Extension System

One of the biggest new things in 3.5.3 is the new Bugzilla::Extension system, which is a complete overhaul of how extensions work. The new extensions system is consistent, fast, and fully documented. It makes it easy to create and distribute extensions. It’s even possible to distribute them via CPAN. And for people who were using the old system, the new system comes with a script to do some automatic conversion of older extensions.

If you want to know more about it, the Bugzilla::Extension documentation contains everything you need to know to write an extension. And you can get started quickly by using the extensions/create.pl script in Bugzilla itself.

Moving to Bzr

Very soon, Bugzilla development will be moving away from CVS and onto Bazaar (called “bzr” for short). CVS will still continue to work as a read-only repository though, so you’ll still be able to update your installations and check out via CVS if you want to. More details about bzr and how Bugzilla will use it will be available after we switch.

The Road to Bugzilla 3.6

The next steps on the road to Bugzilla 3.6 are for us to finish working on all the current blockers, then to write some QA scripts for 3.6, then to write the release notes, and then to do some release candidates, and then to release! The Bugzilla Calendar has more detail on the current estimated dates of release candidates and final release.

And that’s it for the Bugzilla Update for this time!