Mozilla

After languishing for a few years, Pulse got a burst of interest and development in 2014. Since I first heard of it, I’ve found the idea of a central message bus for the goings-on in Mozilla’s various systems rather intruiging, and I’m excited to have been able to grow it over the last year. Pulse falls into that class of problem that is a result of, to borrow from a past Mozilla leader, our tendency to make our lives difficult, that is, to work in the open. Using RabbitMQ as a generic event stream is nothing special; Mozilla’s use of it as an open system is, I believe, completely unique. ...

Everyone loves statistics! Right? Right? Hello? tap tap feedback screech Well anyway, here are some numbers from BMO in 2014: BMO Usage: 33 243 new users registered 45 628 users logged in 23 063 users performed an action 160 586 new bugs filed 138 127 bugs resolved 100 194 patches attached ...

The second half of 2014 was spent finishing up some performance work and shifting into usability improvements, which will continue into 2015. More performance! By the end of 2014, we’d managed to pick most of the low-to-medium-hanging fruit in the world of Bugzilla server-side performance. The result is approximately doubling the performance of authenticated bug views. Here are graphs from January 2014 and October 2014: ...

BMO currently supports five—count ’em, five—ways to search for bugs. Whenever you have five different ways to perform a similar function, you can be pretty sure the core problem is not well understood. Search has been rated, for good reason, one of the least compelling features of Bugzilla, so the BMO team want to dig in there and make some serious improvements. At our Portland get-together a couple weeks ago, we talked about putting together a vision for BMO. It’s a tough problem, since BMO is used for so many different things. We did, however, manage to get some clarity around search. Gerv, who has been involved in the Bugzilla project for quite some time, neatly summarized the use cases. People search Bugzilla for only two reasons: ...

Here’s your mid-year report from the offices, basements, and caverns of BMO! Performance This year we’re spending a lot of time on performance. As nearly everyone knows, Bugzilla’s an old Perl app from the early days of the Web, written way before all the technologies, processes, and standards of today were even dreamt of. Furthermore, Bugzilla (including BMO) has a very flexible extension framework, which makes broad optimizations difficult, since extensions can modify data at many points during the loading and transforming of data. Finally, Bugzilla has evolved a very fine-grained security system, crucial to an open organization like Mozilla that still has to have a few secrets, at least temporarily (for security and legal reasons, largely). This means lots of security checks when loading or modifying a bug—and, tangentially, it makes the business logic behind the UI pretty complex under the hood. ...

A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was no alternative. Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change. It’s rather a small app, based on Tornado, and has a very simple interface, so it should scale quite nicely. It relies on a few moving parts to work, but I’ll start with the basics and explain the whole system later. ...

Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org. We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code. Getting over there was no small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things. ...

2013 was a pretty big year for BMO! I covered a bit in my last post on BMO, but I want to sum up just some of the things that the team accomplished in 2013 as well as to give you a preview of a few things to come. We push updates to BMO generally on a weekly basis. The changelog for each push is posted to glob’s blog and linked to from Twitter (@globau) and from BMO’s discussion forum, mozilla.tools.bmo (available via mailing list, Google Group, and USENET). ...

I went about the seemingly simple task of sharing a directory in OS X with an Ubuntu VMware box so that I could code in my main desktop and run under Linux. The simple sharing dialog is of course only the beginning of the work; after that, I needed to refresh VMware tools, since I had done several kernel upgrades. Well that turned into a few hours of flailing at a command line. ...

A lot of people probably don’t know that I manage the team behind BMO, that is, bugzilla.mozilla.org, Mozilla’s Bugzilla installation. Work on BMO is continuous and incremental, and even really useful features often take a while to percolate through the community, so I thought I’d try to draw attention to some recent improvements that should get you pumped to open a Bugzilla tab. Suggested Reviewers A really exciting, and long-awaited, feature is suggested reviewers. Now when you flag a patch for review, you see a list of people who should make good candidates. And as of today, you can even see the number of reviews in each person’s queue! There is a lot more in this feature, with even more to come, so I’ll just run down a list: ...