Bugzilla 3.4 for maemo.org

I posted this to the maemo community mailing-list before, but I guess it’s worth blogging, too. The long awaited Bugzilla 3.4 for bugs.maemo.org landed in trunk, including maemo.org specific customizations (avoiding it where possible) and a maemo.org skin for a (somewhat) consistent branding.

I deliberately designed the maemo.org look-alike skin for easy maintenance of later (security) updates to Bugzilla, avoiding changes to the templates and the abuse of images for the sake of design — and instead create a consistent feeling using pure CSS. Likewise, fortunately, I was able to port most of the maemo.org customizations previously requiring code changes, by using Bugzilla features introduced way after our current, aging Bugzilla version. This again helps the community to easily and cleanly apply any updates later, without the need to dive into that custom code yet again.

Besides that, the shiny new Bugzilla will offer a bunch of features requested by the community, as well as fixes to bugs reported against the current version — out of the box. Some essential work-streams are finally fully supported, e.g. Brainstorm handling, which required quite a hack before. In particular the bugsquad will be happy about the additional headers in bug-mail for filtering. Just to name a few of the benefits the migration will bring.

Since I am no longer officially working for maemo.org, David King has been taking care of some remaining lose ends the last days. After some further testing, the final result should be “coming soon to a Bugzilla near you”.

Bugzilla maintenance to trunk. Progress.

As Andre mentioned, me being back part-time to the technical side of Bugzilla and taking hacking work off his hands already paid off — some minor, yet much needed Bugzilla tweaks finally went live. While Andre can keep fully concentrating on the growing number of community bug reports, due to a growing community.

The first task turned out to also require quite some cleaning-up, fixing and Perl compatibility coding, to get the maintenance branch back into working state. Once I won the fight with SVN, the requested changes were done quickly. 😉

Currently I’m wading through SVN again (trunk this time), making heads and tails of some confusing commits, chasing missing templates and skins, to get a clean, almost vanilla Bugzilla 3.4 up and running, while maintaining our precious customizations. A whole lot of CSS fun is lurking right behind the corner — Bugzilla with the new maemo.org style!

Back Open, Back to Bugzilla

After an interesting ride internal, I’m back to open and hacking Bugzilla — at least for a couple weeks — helping Andre with technical and coding stuff for maemo.org Bugzilla, as the increasing amount of incoming bug reports takes more and more time. It’s very nice to see the same old guys still around.

My priority tasks are first some quick, much needed tweaks to the current version. Then on to new lands, getting Bugzilla 3.4 in shape for maemo.org. Stay tuned.

Why, what?

If it’s a hardware failure, why does it strike twice in a row at 6 AM? If the four NIC goes bonkers, why is that related to the sound card? If it is a bus, why does a freaking centimeter make a difference?

I don’t know.

All I do know is, that I am back online. Different four NIC, different slot, minus sound card. So what the hell is really failing here? The four NIC, the sound card, the board — or a combination thereof?

Definitely a combination. Something died, something is about to die.

I am online. For the moment.

Hackergotchi

Finally, got myself a floating head. Woot! Yes, that’s me on the left (or right, depending where you actually read this).

After being physically maltreated to get some decent pictures taken to work with, getting nicened-up, re-assembled and undergoing other unspeakable treatment — it is done. Thanks a ton to the artist, a close friend of mine.

Oh, and yeah, unlike most pictures of me, I actually like my little hackergotchi. 🙂

You can find it live right next to my posts on Planet GNOME, Planet Openismus, as well as statically on my blog‘s main site.

Invasion of the Forums

So recently, some $user entity joined a particular mailing-list. And starts asking questions. Nothing wrong with that!

Granted, quite a cannonade of questions. Sure, we can handle that. Showing off a profound lack of understanding what he’s dealing with. Right, we are patient, usually, and can explain (again) or point to specific doc sections (yet again). Asking quite dumb questions, often with a confrontational undertone. This is where it gets annoying.

Today, that new kid in the kindergarten came to an obvious conclusion. We need a proper forum! This current $thingy is unberable. And he would even provide the forum. No, wait, he already got a domain… Mind you, the $thingy he uses is a popular “forum frontend for mailing-lists”. I’ll try hard not to mention the name.

So he uses a third-party forum to access a mailing-list, because he can’t handle the mail. Can’t handle the forum either, obviously. And takes the forum front-end’s flaws as evidence a mailing-list is unusable, and we need a forum. This logic strikes me.

Did I mention the list’s topic is about email, quite in-depth, filtering, from an admin‘s perspective?

So he got his shiny new domain. I guess he’ll sit there forever, eye-balling his precious forum, constantly reloading the gazillion threads he started to see if anyone answered his questions. He forgot one thing, though — the knowledgeable folks who actually can answer his questions, and properly maintain the forum.

On to more productive things…

bugs.maemo.org Custom Features — version 2.0

Just in time for the Summit, according to plan — I am pleased to blog about another round of custom features and tweaks for the maemo.org Bugzilla. Finally managed to push them live yesterday with our über-busy sys admins. Aside from quite a few almost-invisible stuff behind the scenes, general minor polishing, re-phrasing and branding, there are highly visible and useful features, to make Bugzilla a more pleasant experience for all of us.

Just like Nokia employees, active Maemo community members now are labeled as such on comments, generally giving a hint to their commitment and knowledge about the Maemo platform. You deserve it! We’ve started to add this bit to a few members already — if you spot one we’ve missed but should have this, please don’t hesitate to ping Andre or me.

A long-standing request is being added automatically to the Cc list when commenting on bugs. This now is a user preference, by default adding you to any bug sufficiently interesting to you to comment on. If you prefer the previous behavior (hey Ryan), getting it back is just two clicks away. Of course, this still can be set on a case-by-case basis.

Another convenient enhancement are visually highlighted quotes, making it easy to distinguish between the new information and what it refers to. Enjoy, I hope you like it!

Recently added task: Custom hacks to Bugzilla to provide IRC bot interoperability. Working on it with jott, this will be a nice feature for the IRC channel.

On a related note — already half way in Berlin. I’m excited to see you there!

mc-fast says thumbs up

Yay, mc-fast is back. And what a nice feedback it sent me…

Freqs for those rules in 'mc-fast' mass-check:
  MSECS    SPAM%     HAM%     S/O    RANK   SCORE  NAME
      0     1996     1999    0.500   0.00    0.00  (all messages)
0.00000  49.9625  50.0375    0.500   0.00    0.00  (all messages as %)
0.00000  41.1323   0.0000    1.000   1.00    0.01  T_PQRTW_4

Could it possibly be I just created a killer rule to identify > 40% spam with no false positives? Seriously low scoring spam. Using a single, really short RE? Could it possibly be there is one major spammer out there, that uses this easy to catch finger print on all his spam? And that no one spotted it before…?

Granted, that’s just a tiny pre-flight corpus used for some very basic, fast evaluation. Eagerly awaiting the real mass-check results tomorrow…

bugs.maemo.org Custom Features

Some of the stuff I have been hacking on in the background recently finally has been rolled and pushed on bugs.maemo.org — now that the infrastructure issues have been resolved. Thanks, Ferenc.

Besides some nicening up (A bunch of delimiting dashes with HTML and CSS? Yeah, right…), the reporter and some roles are now clearly stated for every comment. No more scrolling and jumping through the page, just to find out if the commenter is the original reporter. No more mouse twiddling, to see if a commenter is a Nokia employee. You now have that invaluable information right at your fingertips.

Yes, I’ve been spoiled by GNOME bugzilla. Probably the best bugzilla out there. There are a lot of features that just make a triagers life much easier. Supporting the workflow rather than being interruptive. And now we got the first set of bugzilla enhancements for maemo.org.

Hope you will enjoy these first custom features. Got some more tweaks like this and larger features on my list, and started working on that already…

SpamAssassin committer status

More backlogged news. I’ve been invited and accepted to become a SpamAssassin committer a couple weeks ago. Quite an honor, given there are not many hackers with this status. Even more so, because I did contribute to SA before in various ways, but didn’t yet submit rules or code for upstream inclusion.

I guess, coming up with a few rules that seriously hit low-scoring spam, while resulting in a (less than) negligible amount of false positive hits triggers some attention. The style of arguing and dealing with the developers may have helped, too. Anyway, I am now one of these developers myself. Yay me. 😉

Unfortunately, ever since I’ve been granted this status, I didn’t have the time nor sufficient sneaky spam to develop new rules. Until now. Spotted a pattern yesterday night, and hacked up some rules — turns out, this is a new ratware variant, no hits older than a week. I expect more of these, soon.

Thanks guys (you know who you are). Access to the nightly mass-checks is just awesome to check a rules performance in development.