What's up, Bugzilla?

[Dylan Hardison]

Bugs are good for communicating discrete tasks, but I feel a monthly
check-in would be healthy for the project.
With that in mind, let this be the first volume of "What's up, Bugzilla?"

This will obviously not be exhaustive, and is just from my perspective. :-)

I'm getting pretty excited about the hopefully-soon release of 6.0.
Having the sandstone skin as default[1]
the cleaner REST framework (which will hopefully allow us to have more
RESTy APIs in the future),
faster memcached (both Cache::Memcached::Fast[2] and the recent patch
to remove (un-needed) detainting)[3]
a standard-ish perl dependency situation[4], and a pretty friendly
out-of-the-box development experience[5], these are just some of my
favorite things. :)

Things To Do for the 6.0 release.

1) Currently :justdave is reviewing Bug 988971[1], but nothing stops
other people from taking that patch and applying it to master,
    and reporting back their findings. Doing that would definitely be
appreciated :-)
2) I'm sure :dkl and/or :LpSolit wouldn't mind someone becoming
familiar with the release note process. There is a guide for it [10].
3) I've been trying to create higher-quality bugs, especially when I
can't find time to work on them. Many of these are performance
related:
    - Using Sereal for memcache would yield a good boost for sites
using memcached [6].
    - Being smarter about creating custom fields in Bugzilla::Bug
object. One approach is described in the user story field [7].
    - There's no bug open for this, but I would like to have more
tests for our Markdown implementation. This is probably the easiest to
test component of the whole system,
      and we've had a lot of formatting bugs [8].

There are things to look for beyond 6.0: The Modal UI, used on BMO, is
probably not going to make the 6.0 release.
Development of it on the BMO side of things is progressing at a
furious rate and it is likely to be defaulted to on at the end of this
quarter.
The task of making that work for vanilla Bugzilla is straight-forward
although tedious.

A good first step for this would be getting Needinfo included as a
core feature[9].

It's not so much asking for help (we'll get to where we're going
eventually) but more to communicate what's going on, and to highlight
some things
that someone else *could* do without having to invest a significant
amount of time.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=988971 "988971 –
Replace Classic with "Sandstone" skin as Standard skin"
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1189281 "1189281 –
Use Cache::Memcached::Fast instead of Cache::Memcached"
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1274764 "1274764 –
Increasing memcached performance is possible because
Cache::Memcached::Fast does not need detainting"
[4]: https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla/blob/master/Makefile.PL
"bugzilla/Makefile.PL at master · bugzilla/bugzilla · GitHub"
[5]: http://dylanwh.tumblr.com/post/144277013247/developing-bugzilla-with-plackup-and-cpanminus
"snippets  Developing Bugzilla with Plackup and cpanminus "
[6]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1275545 "1275545 –
Use Sereal for Cache::Memcached::Fast"
[7]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1275112 "1275112 –
_create_cf_accessors() should be called once at startup, not as part
of Bugzilla::Bug->new"
[8]: https://github.com/bugzilla/bugzilla/blob/master/t/100markdown.t
"bugzilla/100markdown.t at master · bugzilla/bugzilla · GitHub"
[9]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1277592 "1277592 –
Bug Modal will require the Needinfo extension to be a core feature of
Bugzilla"
[10]: https://www.bugzilla.org/docs/releasenote.html "Release Noting
Guide :: Bugzilla :: bugzilla.org"