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”.

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!

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.

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!

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…

But myself, my involvement in Free Software and maybe some random thoughts and rants. I’ll try to keep rants low, though. Re-introducing myself, since I have neglected my blog for way too long, here are some quick facts in a nutshell:

I’ve been an active Community guy for a long time, dating back to the old Helix-Code / Ximian days. Bugsquad volunteer, lurker and occasional triager, have been a heavy load triager in the past. Maintainer of GARNOME, the build utility for the GNOME Desktop, member of the GNOME Release Team, and of course GNOME Foundation member.

And recently hired by Openismus as maemo.org bugmaster, together with Andre, to support the community around Maemo. An awesome opportunity, and working with the friendly maemo.org community already has been quite some fun. I’ll add more colorful bits soon while I go along. I promise.