27. April 2011

Release of Bugzilla 4.1.2, 4.0.1, 3.6.5, and 3.4.11

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Hey Bugzilla users! We just released four new versions of Bugzilla. There were a lot of cool bug fixes in 3.6.5 and 4.0.1, but most importantly, if you had trouble installing Bugzilla 4.0, you should try again now with Bugzilla 4.0.1. There was a problem with the way that our install-module.pl script installed the Math::Random::Secure module–basically, it would install the module even though the module’s prerequisites failed to install. Then when you tried to run checksetup.pl, Math::Random::Secure would throw a cryptic error about “Math::Random::Secure::irand.”

Now, in 4.0.1 and 3.6.5, install-module.pl won’t install the module if installing it would break your system. Basically, following the standard installation instructions should work fine, now. Bugzilla 3.4.11 took this a step further and no longer uses Math::Random::Secure at all for this older branch (although don’t worry, Bugzilla 3.4.x is still secure).

For 4.1.2, we made this protection even more extreme–install-module.pl now completely refuses to operate if you don’t have a compiler installed somewhere on your system (because so many CPAN modules require a compiler, and CPAN throws very confusing error messages when there is no compiler available on your system).

New Features in 4.1.2

All right, with all that out of the way, let’s talk about new features in 4.1.2! Here’s a quick list of important new things:

  • Extensions can call a web\_dir method to get the on-disk path to where web-accessible files should go for the extensions.
  • Work to improve Bugzilla’s accessibility (per the WAI WCAG) is ongoing.
  • There’s a new hook in Bugzilla::Install::Filesystem to allow extensions to create their own files, directories, etc.
  • Searching by relative dates (like 1d, 1w, etc.) now don’t round you off to the beginning of the time period (that is, the beginning of the day, the start of the week) unless you put the letter “s” after them (exception: searching for “0d” or “0w” still gives you the start of that the current day, week, etc.).
  • New WebService function: Product.create
  • New WebService function: Group.create
  • If you change the requestee of a flag that is set to “?”, the “requester” will not change.
  • install-module.pl now requires a compiler to be installed on the system.
  • Update to YUI 2.9.0.
  • contrib/bugzilla_ldapsync.rb has been removed (it was non-functional).
  • If you are using some authentication method that uses the extern_id field (like LDAP), you can now edit a user’s extern_id from the Users control panel.

The Plan For Pretty

So, as you may have read, the “Make Bugzilla Pretty” contest is over, and Jonathan Wilde has won. The current plan is for his UI to be the new official UI for Bugzilla 5.0, which will come some time after 4.2.

Basically, the way that it will work is this: After we branch for 4.2, we will create a new “pretty” branch. The Bugzilla team will work on implementing the new UI in this branch, while simultaneously doing new feature development on the normal Bugzilla trunk. Once the “pretty” branch is ready, it will be merged back into the trunk. We can do this all fairly efficiently thanks to bzr.

Now, there is a chance that the “pretty” branch won’t be ready by the time we want to do the release that follows 4.2. In this case, that release will be called 4.4 and the release after that will have the new UI. However, we very much want to release the new UI as soon as possible, so our goal is for 5.0 to be the release after 4.2.

Get Involved

As always, we love new contributors in every area. There are a lot of ways to contribute to Bugzilla–you don’t just have to be a programmer. In particular, we’d really love to have somebody to be in charge of our documentation. If you know anybody who’s a great documenter (including yourself!) who wants to help out an open-source project, please send them our way!