Some folks at mozilla.org and in the Bugzilla developer community have been thinking about how to ensure adequate testing of updates to Bugzilla before putting those updates on mozilla.org's own Bugzilla installation at bugzilla.mozilla.org (b.m.o.).
Currently we experience a number of regressions after each upgrade that other installations don't catch because they are either too small, don't use all the features we use, and/or upgrade later than us. Most of these regressions are just annoying, but a few are serious and debilitating (security holes or data corruption). I can set up a test server and mirror the b.m.o. database on it, but it won't get enough exposure if people can't make real changes to it. What we really need is another installation of Bugzilla that hosts real data, runs the latest code, and gets enough traffic to find regressions and bugs. Thus our plan is to move Bugzilla bugs to a separate installation running the tip or close to the tip of Bugzilla development. Bugzilla has an active community of developers, administrators, and users who regularly use it to track its own bugs; there are almost 3,000 bugs in the Bugzilla product on b.m.o. with enough regular daily activity to catch the vast majority of problems; and the Bugzilla product on b.m.o. uses most of the features of Bugzilla including dependencies, attachment statuses, and groups, ensuring that the wide variety of necessary features can be tested. Hosting Bugzilla bugs on a tip/near-tip installation also means Bugzilla developers will be eating their own dogfood much more regularly, which will be an incentive to keep the tip stable. At the same time, problems with that installation will have a manageable impact on the Bugzilla community's ability to get their work done, unlike b.m.o. where any downtime, even late at night Mountain View time, has a big impact on many people. Under this proposal, Bugzilla bugs will continue to be hosted on mozilla.org servers and supported by mozilla.org and Netscape's Internal Computing (IC) department. Also, we will improve Bugzilla's multiple installation integration support (along with some b.m.o.-specific hacks) to make the transition as painless as possible, including: 1. automatically redirecting users who go to the "enter bug" page for the "Bugzilla" product on b.m.o. to the corresponding page on the new installation; 2. automatically redirecting users who access a Bugzilla bug on b.m.o. to the corresponding bug on the new installation; 3. synchronizing the user authentication databases for the two installations (at least initially, and possibly on an ongoing basis via an LDAP server). Your questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome (followups set to n.p.m.webtools), and you can also follow the action in bug 127876. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127876 -myk
