Bugzilla 25th Anniversary and Special Announcements
David Miller
justdave at bugzilla.org
Sun Aug 27 04:19:43 UTC 2023
*Happy 25th Birthday to Bugzilla!*
Today, August 26, marks the 25th anniversary of Bugzilla!
The first two paragraphs lifted from our Bugzilla history
<https://www.bugzilla.org/about/>:
When mozilla.org first came online in 1998, one of the first
products that was released was Bugzilla, a bug system implemented
using freely available open source tools. Bugzilla was originally
written in TCL <http://www.tcl.tk/scripting/> by Terry Weissman for
use at mozilla.org to replace the in-house system then in use at
Netscape. The initial installation of Bugzilla was deployed to the
public on a mozilla.org server on April 6, 1998
<https://www-archive.mozilla.org/news.html#p17>.
After a few months of testing and fixing on a public deployment,
Bugzilla was finally released as open source via anonymous CVS and
available for others to use on August 26, 1998
<https://www-archive.mozilla.org/news.html#p44>. At this point.
Terry decided to port Bugzilla to Perl <http://www.perl.org>, with
the hopes that more people would be able to contribute to it, since
Perl seemed to be a more popular language. The completion of the
port to Perl was announced on September 15, 1998
<https://www-archive.mozilla.org/news.html#p51>, and committed to
CVS later that night
<https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla/commit/4727e6c09f88e63f02e6c8f359862d0c0942ed36>.
25 years is a long time in the software world, and it makes us happy
that so many people still use Bugzilla to track bug reports and feature
requests for their own products. We hope to continue to breath life into
Bugzilla and continue to modernize it over the years to come!
*New Legal Entity to Manage the Bugzilla Project*
Back in December I made an enthusiastic post
<https://bugzillaupdate.wordpress.com/2022/12/13/upcoming-releases-and-more-fun-stuff/>
about getting Bugzilla back in motion after it kind of stalled for a
while. And then after a month I kind of stopped posting about it. So
what happened?
Well, response to that post was actually pretty enthusiastic in itself.
I heard from several people who wanted to donate money to the project to
get it going again. Which then led to a new problem: we didn’t actually
have a legal way to accept donations at the time. So after asking around
a bit, and a few conference calls between myself, my own company’s
lawyer, and a couple of Mozilla’s lawyers, it was decided that Bugzilla
needed a legal entity to manage it, similar to how Thunderbird has been
operating recently. And, that’s where the little bit of time that I’ve
had to spend on Bugzilla has gone the last 6 months. And as you can
understand, with the legal work going on in the background, there wasn’t
much I could actually talk about until all of the pieces were actually
in place.
Which now brings us to today, when I’m happy to announce the formation
of Zarro Boogs Corporation, which will now be overseeing the Bugzilla
Project. This is a taxable non-profit non-charitable corporation - we
have filed with the IRS our intent to operate under US Tax Code
§501(c)(4) (still pending approval from the IRS) meaning the IRS would
require us to spend money raised on project expenses and not make a
profit, but money donated to us will not earn you a tax deduction
because we aren’t a charity (software development is not considered a
charitable cause in the US). Unlike Thunderbird, which is a subsidiary
of the Mozilla Foundation, we are an independent entity not owned by or
associated with the Mozilla Foundation, although they have licensed the
use of the Bugzilla trademark to us.
The name Zarro Boogs Corporation is a shout-out to the phrase returned
by Bugzilla when you run a search which returns no results, “Zarro Boogs
found.” The buggy spelling of “Zero Bugs” being intentional because it’s
generally believed that there’s no such thing as a project with zero
bugs in it, only bugs that haven’t yet been reported, thus, saying “Zero
Bugs” is, in itself, buggy. There’s a nice write-up of this on Wikipedia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla#Zarro_Boogs>.
If you would like to contribute to the project, we have a donation page
set up on GitHub Sponsors <https://github.com/sponsors/bugzilla>. We
hope to have additional ways to donate that don’t require a GitHub
account in the future.
*Upcoming Releases*
Those releases I talked about back in December are finally happening!
Look for these (except for 5.9.1) this coming week! Right now we’re
aiming for Wednesday, August 30th. We are aiming for September 15 for
5.9.1 (because it’s the 25th anniversary of the port from Tcl to Perl).
*4.4.14* – The 4.4 branch has been on life support for a *LONG* time (it
was initially released in *2013!!!*). It supports outdated OSes that are
hard to find or install, let alone test for these days, and we’ve been
itching to drop it for a long time. But our support policy says that we
have to support it for 4 months after the following two major releases.
The next major release after 4.4 was 5.0, and there have been no major
releases after that, which means that 4 month countdown hasn’t even
started yet. I am intending this to be the final release of the 4.4
branch (barring any additional security issues being found in the next 4
months) as the 5.2 release below will start that 4 month countdown to
End-of-Life this branch.
*5.0.4.1* – Why 5.0.4.1 when there’s a 5.0.6 release? Well, if you paid
attention to the change logs, 5.0.5 and 5.0.6 contained a massive schema
change, as well as reformatting almost all of the Perl code in the
source, both of which are a violation of our support policy for a stable
branch (a new-to-the-process release manager pushed the release out not
realizing that, and by the time we caught it, it was too late). A lot of
people noticed this and never upgraded to 5.0.5 or 5.0.6, since they
didn’t contain any security fixes. 5.0.4.1 will give those people
additional fixes for 5.0.4 without forcing them to pick up those schema
and code reformatting changes. Additional updates to the 5.0 branch from
now on will continue from 5.0.4.2 and onward.
*5.2* – This will be the next major release, and will start the 4 month
countdown for discontinuing the 4.4 branch. 5.2 is forked from the 5.0
branch after 5.0.6, and will contain those schema and code formatting
changes from 5.0.5 and 5.0.6 in it. So if you /*did*/ upgrade to 5.0.6,
5.2 will be equivalent to a point upgrade for you. Those schema changes
should have caused a major release to happen anyway, so this is just
fixing the numbering problem with that release (i.e. 5.0.5 should have
been called 5.2 to begin with). Note that *if you are using the 5.1.x
development releases, those did NOT feed into this*, and 5.2 would
actually be a downgrade for you.
*5.1.3* – The 5.1 branch is basically dead, as we’ve put all of our
resources into finishing off the Harmony release (see 5.9.1 below).
We’re going to encourage people on 5.1.x to move to Harmony, but you’ll
want to be mindful of the release blockers first before you make the
jump. There are some features in 5.1.x that were implemented differently
in Harmony, and the code to migrate the related data may or may not work
yet (if the feature in question is listed on the release blockers and
you use it, you’ll want to wait for now). Even though this branch is
dead, we’re going to put out a release with the current batch of
security fixes so you aren’t left high and dry before Harmony is ready
for you.
*5.9.1* – *Coming September 15!* This will be the first official release
off the Harmony branch, and will be classified as a *developer preview
release*, not for production use. This is what will eventually be
Bugzilla 6. The code is mostly good enough to use right now, but there
are still showstoppers to be able to fully release it as a production
release. There are also a few gotchas when upgrading from older versions
of Bugzilla. If you’re interested in helping make Bugzilla 6 happen,
that list of showstoppers is here
<https://github.com/bugzilla/harmony/blob/main/RELEASE_BLOCKERS.md>. We
are hoping to have Bugzilla 6 in release candidate stage (or at least in
beta) by the end of November. The security content for this branch that
goes with the other branch releases will be committed to git at the same
time the other releases get them, since anyone who has this already will
only have it via git pull.
Immediate *Help Wanted*
1. *Documentation*. Harmony (5.9.1) in particular needs a LOT of
documentation help, as what’s there now is pretty specific to trying
to produce a testing environment for bugzilla.mozilla.org, rather
than a standalone Bugzilla.
2. *Section 508 Compliance Audit*. There are a number of US government
agencies who use Bugzilla internally (NASA is a publicly visible
example). New US government projects have to comply with the new
accessibility guidelines in Section 508 of the Communications Act,
so if we want them to be able to upgrade we need to comply (at least
in our newer versions). See https://section508.gov/. There is a
template for a compliance statement at
https://www.section508.gov/sell/vpat/. I would love to get a
volunteer (or a company who can sponsor someone?) who could audit
the 5.2 and harmony branches for compliance, file bugs for things
that are violations, and figure out how much of the VPAT we can
actually provide at this point. Even if we’re not compliant yet (I
suspect we aren’t) I would love to be able to provide a statement
with the 5.2 release saying how compliant we are, and listing what’s
left to be fixed to make us compliant. See also Bug 1785941
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1785941>. Some work
has been done on this (as you can see in the dependent bugs to that
one) but it still needs help.
*Ongoing Help Wanted*
You can always find a list of ways to contribute to Bugzilla on our
Contributing page <http://bugzilla.org/contributing/>. A few highlights
with additional details:
* *Donate Money*. Now that we have a legal entity capable of paying
developers, we need money to pay them with (and also cover our
server hosting expenses). You can donate via our GitHub Sponsors
<https://github.com/sponsors/bugzilla> page. If you don’t have and
can’t create a GitHub account, we hope to have other ways to donate
in the future.
* *Bug Triage!* As you probably noticed from the lack of updates
around here in a while, the bug list hasn’t been getting paid much
attention to, either. Part of getting this project moving again
means re-triaging the existing bug reports. Some of them are really
ancient and may not even apply to the current code-base anymore. I’m
going to have another blog post coming in the next day or two (for
real this time) with information on this topic (specifics for how to
help with it), so keep an eye out for that post!
* *Code!* Once we get the above triage moving, there will be bugs to
fix! Bugzilla is an Open Source project, and anyone can contribute!
We also have a relatively small user base compared to some of the
big projects out there, so the amount of development we’ll be able
to fund internally from our donations will still be limited. It will
probably make better sense for us to use our internal developers
(once we have money to pay some) to review patches and coach
external contributors, instead of having them directly producing code.
* *Paid Developer Time*. If you are a business that makes use of
Bugzilla, and has a staff person responsible for maintaining your
Bugzilla installation, and that person is willing, please consider
officially sponsoring that person to help with upstream Bugzilla
development for at least a few hours per week. Most of our lack of
development lately has happened because the last few companies that
used to do that stopped providing developer time during the economic
downturn a few years back (either laid off said person or pulled
them away to work on other things), and they haven’t returned. The
developers we have currently (until we get money donated as listed
above) are all volunteer, and most of them are struggling to find
time to work on it.
In Conclusion
We have a lot of excitement ahead of us with the first developer preview
of Bugzilla 6 coming later this week (I was hoping to have that for you
all today as well, but we didn’t quite make it), and the new
opportunities in store for us with a real business entity to support the
project now. Come find us in any of our chat rooms (links are in the
footer of our website <https://bugzilla.org/> alongside the social media
links) or drop in on our developers mailing list
<https://lists.bugzilla.org/listinfo/developers> if you’d like to help.
--
[Bugzilla Logo]
*Dave Miller*
Project Leader
*Bugzilla Project*
https://bugzilla.org/
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