Using Hotmail with Thunderbird 3 22 juin 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Mozilla.4 comments
As I couldn’t find easy steps to follow to use Hotmail with Thunderbird 3, I decided to write my own article about it. And as screenshots are better than thousands of words, here you have. The screenshots are in french, but it’s trivial to understand which field is what.
Comme je ne parvenais pas à trouver une marche à suivre simple pour utiliser Hotmail depuis Thunderbird 3, j’ai décidé d’écrire mon propre article dessus. Comme des captures d’écran valent mille mots, voici pour vous.
Parameters for incoming emails
Parameters for outcoming emails
Aller sur Mars, mais pour quoi faire? 3 juin 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Uncategorized.add a comment
Ce n’est pas la première fois que je me pose la question, mais c’est la première fois que je la pose ici: “À quoi sert-il d’envoyer des humains sur Mars?” Je viens de recevoir un email de la NASA (NASA Science News) et cette phrase me fait (de nouveau) bondir:
"[...] how much of a threat severe solar flares pose to astronauts en route to the Moon and Mars."
J’ai beau discuter avec des scientifiques et notamment des astrophysiciens, et personne ne peut me donner un argument en faveur d’une expédition vers Mars. Il n’y a rien qu’un humain puisse faire qu’un robot ne pourrait faire (si ce n’est d’éviter de s’enliser). Le seul argument que je vois, c’est le “prestige” d’avoir posé le pied sur une autre planète. En d’autres termes, c’est purement politique, et nullement scientifique. Sans compter les milliards de $$$ que cela va coûter, ni les conséquences sur le mental des astronautes qui vont passer près de 2 ans dans l’espace, dont plusieurs mois consécutifs enfermés dans leur module spatial, une sorte de cage à lapins volante.
Simpler form to file bugs in Bugzilla 3.4 24 mai 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.4 comments
In my previous post, I talked about the new front page which will be used in Bugzilla 3.4 (it will very likely change again in Bugzilla 3.6 to look something like this). Now I’m going to talk about the new form to file bugs. Technically, it’s the same page as before, but we now hide some fields by default which we don’t consider to be critical when reporting a new bug.
The form to file bugs in Bugzilla 3.2 and older looks like this:
Full bug filing form
There are many fields which advanced users probably love to see when reporting a new bug, but they may look too complicated for newbies. With the idea that newbies know mostly nothing about the internals of Bugzilla, and that they probably won’t know what to set, we know display important fields only, by default:
Simple bug filing form
The information requested here seems small enough to not frighten new reporters. We could even imagine hidding the OS + hardware fields, as well as the component field, but I suppose the form would then look a bit too much like Hendrix. Anyway, it’s still a big improvement over what Bugzilla 3.2 displays to the user. And before you ask: yes, you can display all fields if you want to. Simply click the “Show Advanced Fields” link at the top of the page. Bugzilla will store your choice in a cookie so that you don’t have to worry about it in the future. Cool, isn’t it? 
In my next post, I will show you how administrators can configure Bugzilla 3.4 to display some fields under certain circumstances only (for instance, on a per-product basis, or only for a given severity/priority, etc…) Another cool feature. 
New front page for Bugzilla 3.4 16 avril 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.18 comments
This is the first post about new features/UI improvements available in what will become Bugzilla 3.4. I realized that many readers don’t waste their time following links in articles; if a screenshot is not included in the article itself, they ignore links pointing to them. So I decided to insert as many screenshots as possible so that you have them immediately in front of you. And also, you can no longer complain that you didn’t know about such or such (bad) improvements when your Bugzilla installation is upgraded.
Today, I will talk about what will be the most noticeable UI change: the front page.
Front page displayed to logged out users
Above can you see the new front page displayed to logged out users. There are two major changes: the 3 big buttons in the center of the page, and the login form in the header and footer of the page (the login form is now in the header and footer of all pages). The first button (the green one) will let you file a new bug. Of course, it will display the login form first as you cannot file anonymous bug reports. The second button (the orange one) will display the search page (the specific or advanced search based on your cookie; the specific one being the default). And the third button (the blue one) will let you create a new user account. Below buttons can you see a search field, well known as a “quick search” (which is more powerful than the specific search form, which is mostly useless, but less powerful than the advanced search form. My vote to kill the specific search form completely, but that’s another story).
Some users already complained that there are now 6 ways to run searches from this single page: the “Search” link in the header, the “QuickSearch” form in the header (the one with the “Find” button) the big orange button in the middle, the “QuickSeach” form below big buttons, the “Search” link in the footer and the “QuickSearch” form in the footer (again, the one with the “Find” button). I agree this may look confusing to new users. Also, there are now 3 links to create a new user account: the “New Account” link in the header and in the footer as well as the big blue button. And finally, some complained that the “File a Bug” button is useless as you have to log in first anyway. Not ideal? Your feedback is welcome!
When you are logged in, the front page will look like this:
Front page displayed to logged in users
The only major difference compared to the logged out page is that the blue button now points to your user preferences. Also, the login form disappeared and is replaced by your login name, as in previous Bugzilla versions. We all agree that this page is suboptimal for logged in users, as much more useful data could be displayed instead of these big buttons (advanced users already use links in the header/footer of the page anyway). But we plan to improve it for Bugzilla 3.6.
Do you like it? Do you hate it? You have no opinion? Please let us know!
Bugzilla 3.2.3 and 3.3.4 released 31 mars 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.add a comment
We finally released Bugzilla 3.2.3 and Bugzilla 3.3.4 last night, March 30. All existing Bugzilla 3.x installations will get automatic notifications within 24 hours (if administrators enabled this feature).
Bugzilla 3.2.3 fixes some important bugs:
- One of the security fixes implemented in Bugzilla 3.2.1 broke the ability to edit several bugs at once if the installation was using a shadow DB with the –read-only option (Bugzilla was trying to write into the shadow DB instead of the master DB). Installations not using a shadow DB are not affected by this issue.
- Due to our new token protection implemented in Bugzilla 3.2.1 to prevent unwanted bug changes, some Bugzilla clients were unable to edit bugs anymore as they had no valid token in hands. The XML format of bugs now contains a valid token which can be used to edit them (keep in mind that the token is generated based on the user ID, so you cannot use your own token with someone else, which is the goal of using tokens!).
- Saved searches with UT8 characters in their name no longer crash Bugzilla (again a regression due to one of the security fixes implemented in Bugzilla 3.2.1).
- Due to a change in MySQL 5.1.31 and newer, “SET SESSION max_allowed_packet” is no longer allowed, making previous versions of Bugzilla 3.2.x to fail. This problem is now fixed.
- Attachments now have the same token protection as bugs themselves. This is our last security fix related to cross-site request forgery (read the previous security advisory if you want to see which other areas were fixed in our previous security release).
All known regressions introduced in Bugzilla 3.2.1/3.2.2 have been fixed in Bugzilla 3.2.3. This means you really should upgrade your installation to 3.2.3.
Bugzilla 3.3.4 is our last development release before Bugzilla 3.4rc1. This means it’s feature complete and we will now only focus on bug fixes (enhancements are no longer allowed on this branch). Newly introduced features are listed in the Status Update. The most significant change is the new front page (screenshot). Feedback is much welcome! Please keep in mind that Bugzilla 3.3.4 got no QA at all, meaning that it’s potentially unstable. If you need a stable release, use Bugzilla 3.2.3.
To developers, note that we have reopened the trunk and new enhancements are again allowed. The current trunk version is Bugzilla 3.5 (which will become Bugzilla 3.6 when it’s stable). The 3.4 branch is tagged BUGZILLA-3_4-BRANCH.
Do not use MySQL 5.1.31 or newer with Bugzilla 3.2 – 3.2.2 24 février 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.10 comments
As described in bug 480001, MySQL 5.1.31 and newer no longer let you write ‘SET SESSION max_allowed_packet = xxxx’ (this variable is now read-only, unless set globally). As we are calling it from two different places in Bugzilla 3.2, 3.2.1 and 3.2.2, those versions won’t work together. I hope this problem will be fixed in Bugzilla 3.2.3.
Update: this bug has been fixed and will be available in Bugzilla 3.2.3, which should be released very soon now (probably next week).
Err…. new Bugzilla releases only 9 hours after the old ones 3 février 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.add a comment
On February 2, around 17:40 PST (Feb 3, 1:40 GMT), we happily released Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7, which fixed several security issues. Less than 3 hours later, bug 476594 was filed on b.m.o, reporting a problem with srand() on mod_perl (read details in the bug), which is called when you call rand() in your code. This bug was undetected while writing security patches and while reviewing them, because most developers don’t use mod_perl on their test installations. Also, this problem hasn’t been detected on our “secret” mod_perl test installation, probably because race conditions couldn’t occur due to the low number of testers playing with it at the same time. But as soon as b.m.o upgraded to Bugzilla 3.2.1, the problem became very clear, and we have to address a big THANK YOU to Philippe M. “gozer” Chiasson to help us debug and fix the problem very quickly. Only 9 hours after the releases mentioned above, i.e. on February 3 around 2:40 PST (Feb 3, 10:40 GMT), Max Kanat-Alexander, our release manager, uploaded new tarballs on the FTP server, and the website was updated to announce the immediate release of Bugzilla 3.3.3, 3.2.2 and 3.0.8, with this single change in them (it’s actually a single line change). We didn’t release Bugzilla 2.22.8 as 2.22 doesn’t support mod_perl, and so is not affected by the problem.
That was a pretty intense and busy evening/night/morning (depends where you live on the planet) for Bugzilla developers: first, we had to commit 20 security patches (backports included) to CVS, then fix some QA scripts which were affected by the security fixes above, create and upload tarballs, update the website, then track the problem with srand() on mod_perl, review the patch, write and review the new security advisory and new release notes (it was the first time I had to do reviews from work…. you know, I’m teaching ), recreate and upload tarballs again, and finally update the website once more. Wow! But things seem to be going well now; no regression has been reported to b.m.o (yet).
Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7 released 3 février 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.add a comment
As announced last Saturday, we released Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7 today! Read the Security Advisory and the Status Update for more information. If you want to keep informed about the Bugzilla activity, you should know that there is now a “Bugzilla Community” group on Facebook. Feel free to join!
Max is a bit more verbose than me today. You can read his article here.
Release date of Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7: Monday, Feb 2, 2009 31 janvier 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.add a comment
A quick note to let you know that Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7 should be released on Monday (in two days). All security patches have been reviewed, all blockers have been fixed, and release notes are also ready. Those are important security releases, do no miss them!
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Un mot rapide pour vous dire que Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 et 2.22.7 devraient sortir lundi dans 2 jours. Tous les patchs de sécurité ont été approuvés, tous les bugs bloquant la sortie ont été résolus, et les notes de mise à jour sont prêtes. Il s’agit de mises à jour de sécurité importantes, alors ne les manquez pas!
Lorsque vos élèves trouvent votre blog, vous faites quoi? 30 janvier 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Uncategorized.Tags: enseignement
9 comments
Nous y voilà, après deux ans à publier des articles sur Bugzilla en toute impunité, voilà que mes élèves se mettent à rechercher activement mon blog sur le web (et certains l’ont déjà trouvé!), sans doute par esprit de vengeance (je suis tombé sur plusieurs de leurs blogs il y a quelques jours, et ils le savent). Alors fini la vie tranquille où je ne mélange pas le travail et le plaisir, voilà que tout interfère. Mais bon, ce n’est sans doute que le juste retour des choses. Et au contraire de certaines personnes que je ne citerai pas, je n’ai rien à cacher. Bien au contraire!
MES CHERS ÉLÈVES: si vous lisez ceci, profitez-en pour devenir de bon citoyens du royaume Mozilla (le royaume quoi?? Mozilla, ceux qui produisent notamment Firefox, ce avec quoi vous lisez certainement ce blog), soyez prudents lorsque vous visitez des sites ou postez des informations, et surtout…. rappelez-vous qu’Internet est aussi sécurisé qu’un… wagon CFF (SNCF pour les Français), c’est-à-dire que vous avez beau discuster avec la personne assise en face ou à côté de vous, tout le monde peut entendre votre conversation, même si ces personnes ne sont pas concernées par votre sujet de discussion. Vos blogs, c’est la même chose: vous pouvez écrire dessus avec l’idée qu’ils seront avant tout lus par vos camarades de jeu, mais n’importe quel “voyageur” (du web, cette fois-ci) peut les lire et réagir. Fort heureusement, je n’y ai découvert ni injures, ni mensonges, ce qui est tout à votre honneur.
Certains de mes élèves se sont étonnés de me voir réagir sur leur blog… “QUOI?? Un prof qui vient voir le site de ses élèves? Il n’a rien de mieux à faire le gros pervers?”. Je me permets de répondre que lorsque votre nom (en l’occurence le mien) est explicitement cité sur un blog d’élève, il est relativement facile de le détecter (via Google ou autres), et selon le contenu, une réponse est envisageable. C’est ce que j’ai fait. N’y voyez aucune volonté de jouer au flic, nous ne sommes pas à l’école. Certains trouvent amusant de “voir” leur prof dans un blog, d’autres sont choqués. À chacun sa sensibilité; et je la respecte dans les deux cas.
Reste un détail non négligeable: quelle attitude adopter lorsqu’une telle discussion (via un blog) s’engage sur Internet? Car certains élèves sont visiblement friands que leurs profs s’engagent dans la conversation; ils trouvent cela trop… drôle, amusant, insolite (mais peut-être qu’avec le temps, ils trouveront cela moins drôle, voire pénible, de voir leur prof à l’école et après l’école). S’agit-il de garder une posture d’enseignant s’adressant à ses élèves? D’un adulte s’adressant à des adolescents mais laissant de côté l’aspect scolaire (”Une heure de retenue à celui qui écrit des idioties sur mon blog!”), ou un ton plus “familier” est-il autorisé? Ou est-il en premier lieu autorisé (pas au sens de la loi, car la loi ne l’interdit pas, mais au sens de l’éthique) de s’adresser à ses élèves via ce canal de communication? Je serais le premier tenté à laisser de côté les aspects prof-élèves, car certains élèves sont vraiment “chouettes” (synonymes: cools, sympas, agréables) et ont un humour ou une personnalité qui me plaît; mais de retour à l’école, seront-ils encore capables de faire la distinction “relation en classe” par rapport à une “relation hors école”? Je ne suis pas sûr. Et d’un point de vue des parents, ce genre d’interactions est-il positivement perçu? Encore moins sûr, et je peux les comprendre.
Lorsque j’étais élève, ce genre de questions ne se posait pas: Internet n’existait pas encore (du moins pas à l’échelle du grand public), mais ce que je sais, c’est que j’avais du plaisir à discuter avec un prof que j’appréciais lorsque je le croisais dans la rue. Un blog peut-il être perçu comme une “rue” de l’Internet? Aucune idée! Cela fait beaucoup de questions sans réponses… Mais même un prof ne sait pas tout, et oui!
Et vous, vous en pensez quoi? Profs, parents, élèves ou autres, vous êtes tous les bienvenus à vous exprimer.
Bugzilla 3.3.1 released 6 janvier 2009
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.add a comment
Bugzilla 3.3.1 has been released last night and is the first development snapshot of what will become Bugzilla 3.4, whose feature freeze date is January 29, 2009. More important new features are available in the last Status Update: users can choose their timezone to display dates and times (especially in bug comments), several improvements to custom fields, two new WebService functions (Bug.get_history and User.get), there is now an email preference to get bugmail for new bugs, users can re-order columns in buglists, user account passwords are now encrypted using SHA-256 instead of the UNIX crypt() function (passwords longer than 8 characters are now correctly validated!), some parameters considered obsolete have been removed, Bugzilla can now use an asynchronous job queue for sending mail (optional and disabled by default, check your parameters), on midair collisions users can decide to only submit the comment and skip other changes, … and of course code cleanup and improvements (such as decreasing the load on the DB when viewing bugs, refactoring of the product and classification code).
In a couple of days (I hope!) will also be released Bugzilla 3.3.2, 3.2.1, 3.0.7 and 2.22.7 with several security fixes (a last one to fix, and we are ready to go). Stay tuned!
La politique? Une bataille de cour de récréation 26 décembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Uncategorized.add a comment
Je n’ai jamais beaucoup aimé la politique, car je n’ai jamais trouvé les gens de ce milieu sincères. Je n’en connais pas personnellement exerçant à un haut niveau, et je ne me base que sur mes impressions en regardant la TV et les journaux, mais voilà, c’est comme ça que je perçois les politiciens. De même, derrière de beaux sourires et franches poignées de mains, je me demande lesquels sont vraiment sincères; probablement pas beaucoup. Bref…
Mais il y a quand même des choses qui me font bondir au niveau politique: ce sont ces STUPIDES batailles de cour d’école que nous appelons pompeusement des “relations diplomatiques”. Un exemple? Les tensions entre la Suisse et la Lybie à cause de l’arrestation de Hannibal Kadhafi il y a quelques mois. Ce serait vous ou moi, tout le monde s’en ficherait, et les journaux n’en parleraient même pas, mais sous prétexte qu’il s’agit de Môsieur Kadhafi, alors là, on en fait toute une histoire… et on mélange joyeusement cet incident avec les échanges économiques entre les deux pays, on retient en “otage” des ressortissants de l’autre pays, etc… etc… bref: je ne vois pas grande différence entre ce genre d’attitude enfantine (des gamineries, pour parler franchement) et des batailles de cour de récréation. Ca fait quand même peur, lorsqu’on y pense un peu. Cela veut dire que certaines personnes n’ont guère évolué entre la puberté et l’âge adulte. La loi du Talion est loin d’être obsolète, ce qui n’est guère flatteur pour l’espèce humaine en ce 21e siècle.
N’y a-t-il pas un darwiniste ou un philosophe dans l’assistance pour m’expliquer en quoi l’espèce humaine est “supérieure” aux autres? Parce que là, franchement, je ne vois pas. Les petits hommes verts venus d’ailleurs doivent bien se marrer en nous voyant; et ils ont raison!
Un peu d’humour (a.k.a a new logo for Firefox) 13 décembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Mozilla.4 comments
Durant l’une de nos très sérieuses discussions sur #frenchmoz (lors de nos habituelles soirées à thème), nous sommes tombés sur cet article concernant les produits Mozilla. Il contient une très intéressante alternative au logo actuel de Firefox. Personnes sérieuses s’abstenir!
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While talking on #frenchmoz, we found this article (in french) about Mozilla products. It contains a very interesting new logo for Firefox. Serious people, please abstain!
Bugzilla 3.2rc2 enfin disponible! 8 novembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.2 comments
Bugzilla 3.2rc2 est enfin disponible depuis hier (la date officielle de sortie est le jeudi 6 novembre, mais avec le décalage horaire, il était déjà vendredi matin en Europe). Cette version, largement basée sur les retours que nous avons reçus sur la version 3.2rc1, sera la dernière RC avant la sortie de la version 3.2 finale. Celle-ci devrait être disponible avant la fin de l’année (voire même d’ici à la fin de ce mois, pour les plus optimistes).
Pour ceux qui auraient déjà installé la version 3.2rc1, voici les principaux changements entre ces deux versions:
- La mise à jour d’une version antérieure de Bugzilla vers la version 3.2rc2 devrait être beaucoup plus rapide avec MySQL par rapport à une mise à jour vers la version 3.2rc1. La partie du code convertissant la table utilisant des indexes “fulltext” était particulièrement lente. Celle-ci est maintenant environ 10 fois plus rapide sur de très grandes installations.
- Si SSL est activé pour les utilisateurs identifiés (ssl=’authenticated sessions’), toutes les pages sont désormais sécurisées, et pas seulement les pages où les utilisateurs s’identifient. Auparavant, un utilisateur pouvait accéder à une page utilisant http:// sans que Bugzilla ne réagisse. Dorénavant, Bugzilla redirige l’utilisateur vers https:// dans tous les cas. Pour les modes ssl=’always’ et ssl=’never’, il n’y a pas de changement.
- Les cookies d’identification ne sont désormais plus accessibles aux scripts JavaScript, grâce à l’attribut HTTPonly. Ceci dans le but de renforcer la sécurité. De même, si SSL est activé, alors ces cookies ne peuvent être transmis que sur des connexions sécurisées, grâce à l’attribut ‘Secure’. Cela veut dire qu’en accédant à Bugzilla via une adresse http://, les cookies d’identification ne sont pas transmis, ceux-ci n’acceptant que des connexions sécurisées https://.
- Bugzilla devrait être globalement plus rapide, grâce à l’optimisation de certaines requêtes, ce qui diminue notablement la charge sur le serveur SQL. De plus, les pages de style CSS sont chargées avant les scripts JavaScript, ce qui permet au navigateur de déjà commencer à afficher les page pendant le chargement des scripts (notamment en utilisant Firefox).
- Plusieurs améliorations concernant l’interface utilisateur (UI) lors du visionnement des bugs. Nous espérons avoir enfin trouvé une mise en page qui convienne au plus grand nombre, sans entraver leurs tâches quotidiennes.
- Le “keyword chooser” (sélecteur de mots clés) a été retiré de la version 3.2rc2. Beaucoup de retours ont été très négatifs concernant cette fonctionnalité. Celle-ci interférait avec les raccourcis claviers dans certains navigateurs et ne permettait plus de rentrer manuellement les mots clés dans les bugs, ce qui était perçu comme une régression inacceptable. Nous espérons proposer une variante plus appropriée dans la version 3.4.
- Si Bugzilla nécessite une mise à jour de son serveur SQL ou si celui-ci est inaccessible pour une quelconque raison, le paramètre ’shutdownhtml’ fonctionnera quand même. Dans les versions 3.2rc1 et antérieures, un message d’erreur (Software Error: …) était affiché comme quoi le serveur SQL était inaccessible, ce qui n’était guère utile pour les utilisateurs.
- Dans la version 3.2rc1, Firefox ne parvenait plus à mettre les pages visitées en cache, ce qui ralentissait notablement la navigation. Ce problème est désormais résolu.
- Le support d’Oracle comme serveur SQL a été grandement amélioré.
En plus de la version 3.2rc2, nous avons également sorti les versions 3.0.6, 2.22.6 et 2.20.7 fixant un problème de sécurité concernant les “quips”, ces petits messages apparaissant en haut des listes de bugs. Il est vivement conseillé de mettre à jour votre installation pour vous prévenir de cette faille.
How to avoid tinyurl when you want to paste a URL to a list of bugs in Bugzilla 29 octobre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.2 comments
On planet.m.o, I see tons of tinyurl’s used to point to lists of bugs (a.k.a buglists). When you run a complex query, this is indeed the best solution for now (till bug 400063 is fixed), but in many cases, the query is simple enough to avoid tinyurl. How? Use QuickSearch!
For those who don’t know, QuickSearch is a built-in feature of Bugzilla. This is the small textbox on the left of the “Find” button you can see on all Bugzilla pages, in the header and in the footer. Maybe you think that all it can do is to get a bug ID and go to this bug when you click the “Find” button, but it can do much more than that!
Let’s take a few examples from recent posts on planet.m.o:
Example 1: Alex Faaborg’s post about polish bugs:
The “Hard Polish Bugs” link currently points to http://tinyurl.com/5e9dd7 but could be replaced by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=prod%3ACore%2CFirefox%2CToolkit+sw%3A%22[polish-hard]%22+kw%3A%22polish%22 (click here for a try). How to get it? In the textbox mentioned aboved (or if you installed the Bugzilla Quick Search plugin, you can get the same result from here), you type:
prod:Core,Firefox,Toolkit sw:"[polish-hard]" kw:polish
“prod:” means “product”, “sw:” means “status whiteboard” and “kw:” means “keywords”. As you are querying in more than one product, you enumerate them separated by a comma. About the status whiteboard, I wrote [polish-hard] between quotes, but they are not mandatory in this case as there is no whitespace nor comma. But I’m used to add them by default for this field as most of the time I’m looking for something of the form [foo bar], i.e. with whitespaces. Without quotes, Bugzilla would read sw:[foo only and wouldn't know what to do with bar] (well, it knows what to do with it, but that’s not what you expect in this case).
You immediately see how to easily build the link for “Easy Polish Bugs“. All you have to do is to type:
prod:Core,Firefox,Toolkit sw:"[polish-easy]" kw:polish
and you get this URL.
Example 2: Mozilla Platform meeting minutes: 2008-10-28:
The “JS 1.9.1 Bugs” link about wanted bugs for JavaScript could easily be obtained by:
prod:Core comp:"JavaScript Engine" flag:wanted1.9.1+
which generates this URL. Here, “prod:” is again the product, “comp:” means “component”, and “flag” is… a flag. In this example, quotes are mandatory for the component because its name has a whitespace in it. Note that you don’t need to specify that you only want open bugs; that’s the default!
Example 3: Calendar Community Testday On Thursday, October 30:
The “some fixed tb-integration bugs that need to be verified” link could be obtained by:
RESO prod:Calendar resolution:FIXED flag:integration
which would generate this URL. Note that we start to type RESO, which means you want bugs with the RESOLVED bug status only. As I said above, the default is to only look for open bugs. If you don’t want to use this default behavior, you have to mention this as the first argument. Then, “resolution” is the bug resolution, here bugs marked as FIXED only. And finally, “flag:” contains a flag name with no +/-/?, meaning that you don’t care, you want all of them. Also, “integration” is not the complete flag name, it’s “tb-integration”. So Bugzilla would return all bugs matching the above criteria, and would also catch bugs having e.g. “fx-integration” if it exists.
Last trick of the day:
If you want to see all bugs waiting for your (super-)review, you can easily get them all at once typing e.g.:
flag:review?LpSolit
Just replace my nick on b.m.o by yours, of course. A shorter alternative is:
review?LpSolit
Bugzilla will automagically consider this last case as a flag due to “?” being detected in the string. That’s the only case where “flag:” is optional. If you suspect there may be requests for review in bugs which are already resolved (either RESOLVED or VERIFIED), you can ask for all of them thanks to:
ALL review?LpSolit
ALL is specified as the first argument to override the default and will make Bugzilla look for both open and closed bugs.
Note that you cannot do everything with QuickSearch. For instance, those testcases are not possible for now.
Bugzilla 3.2 RC2 to come before Bugzilla 3.2 final 23 septembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.5 comments
As I see more and more people asking when Bugzilla 3.2 final will be available for download, I decided to blog about it here: We will first release Bugzilla 3.2 RC2! This hard decision has been taken during our last Bugzilla meeting last week. The reason is that we did many checkins since RC1 and we may have potentially regressed something. But for all those who are impatient, you must know that Bugzilla 3.2 RC2 should be stable enough for production, and is currently in use by both Mozilla and RedHat, just to name a few. But be aware that QA is not complete yet, so there may be hidden (severe) regressions somewhere (even if I don’t think that’s the case; but who knows?).
Is the purpose of captchas to test your visual capabilities? 22 septembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Mozilla.34 comments
While looking at Hendrix, I saw this captcha on the submission form:
captcha
I really have no idea what the second word is (10H? 101l?). And from what my doctor says, my eyes are working perfectly well. The audio alternative doesn’t work on Linux, so I cannot use it as a workaround. I really think such captchas are a bad user experience, especially for those with some disabilities (and in this case, even for those without disabilities).
As an alternative, why not suggesting something more simple? For instance: “How many triangles are not red in the figure below?”
alternative captcha
Unless the reader never went to school, he knows what a triangle is, and which color “red” is. I doubt a robot could easily parse the question (but I may be wrong).
Am I missing something?
Bugzilla Is doing User Studies in the Pittsburgh PA Area 8 septembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.add a comment
I’m publishing this article on behalf of Guy Pyrzak, our UI guy at Bugzilla:
With the recent upgrade of BMO to 3.2, there have been a few usability improvements and a few regressions. These are all things that might be expected with major upgrades to any UI. The Bugzilla team has enjoyed getting the feedback from Mozilla users about how to further improve the User Interface. We’re really trying to focus on improving Bugzilla’s User Interface in the coming versions, but part of doing that is getting good user data. We’ve even got a student group at Carnegie Mellon to do several user studies on how people use bug trackers and Bugzilla in their every day work. However, in order to do user studies they need to find Users!
This is where you all come in. We need some volunteers, in the Pittsburgh PA area to allow our student group to come into wherever you use Bugzilla, home, work etc and video tape, and interview you you while you do your work. The students will have an IRB waiver for you to sign, which just makes sure you’re not harmed while they watch you. The students will want to understand how and why you do your job. They’ll ask you some questions about how you do your work, and why you do, whatever it is you do. In the HCI community this is called a Contextual Inquiry. To find out more about how a Contextual Inquiry works you can read more on Wikipedia.
If you’re not able to let a student group come to your work, but still live in the Pittsburgh PA, you can still help us out! The students will also conduct studies in a more controlled environment, that isn’t where you work. So if you can’t let the student group visit your workplace, please still contact us. The more users we’re able to observe the more data we can collect, and the more we can improve Bugzilla!
Not to worry, we’re also doing other types of usability studies and analysis, but this was an instance where you all could help. Contact guy.pyrzak@gmail.com, or just comment on this blog if you’re interested.
New position for the comment box when editing bugs. Do you like it? 6 septembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla.9 comments
While talking on IRC about how to make editable fields and the comment box closer so that you can easily comment and edit fields, especially the bug status, I suggested this mockup (ignore the fields you never heard about in the right column, those are custom fields). Is that something you would like to see officially implemented in Bugzilla? Or do you think it’s not better than what we have currently, i.e. the comment box just below the attachment table?
What’s your feedback about Bugzilla 3.2? 5 septembre 2008
Posted by Frédéric Buclin in Bugzilla, Mozilla.7 comments
As most of you know, Bugzilla 3.2rc1 is available for download since August 12 and bugzilla.mozilla.org upgraded to this version two weeks later, last Thursday. As I wrote in my last blog, b.m.o is not the first major installation to upgrade to 3.2rc1, so now seems a good time to get some feedback from people using this version of Bugzilla to know what’s their feeling with it, both about its UI and about its usability and new features. Mozilla folk reported a pretty large number of bugs, usability regressions, and complains, but as someone told me, they didn’t file bugs for things they like. So I thought this blog would be a better place to get your feedback, both positive and (highly?) negative, to get a better picture of what people think before releasing the final version of Bugzilla 3.2.
Note that this feedback can come from everybody using Bugzilla 3.2rc1 (or 3.1.4+), such as users of RedHat’s Bugzilla or OpenSSH’s Bugzilla, or even from smaller installations which already upgraded to this version. The wider the audience, the better.
