Category: maemo

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”.

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!

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.

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!