As mentioned in my previous post on MozReview, one of the biggest sources of confusion is the way we present the “squashed” diffs, that is, the diff that show all of the changes in a commit series, the sum of all the proposed changes. We also refer to these as “parent” review requests, since they function as something to hold all the commits together. They are stored in MozReview as separate review requests, similar to the individual commits....
MozReview was intentionally released early, with a fairly minimal feature set, and some ugly things bolted onto a packaged code-review tool. The code-review process at Mozilla hasn’t changed much since the project began—Splinter, a slightly fancier UI than dealing with raw diffs, notwithstanding. We knew this would be a controversial subject, with a variety of (invariably strong) opinions. But we also knew that we couldn’t make meaningful progress on a number of long-desired features, like autolanding commits and automatic code analysis, without moving to a modern repository-based review system....
Two weeks ago the MozReview developers got together to do some focussed hacking. It was a great week, we got a lot of stuff done, and we clarified our priorities for the coming months. We deployed several new features and improvements during the week, and we made good progress on several other goals. For this week, we actually opted to not go to a Mozilla office and instead rented an AirBNB in Montreal—our own little hacker house!...
MozReview will soon be using Bugzilla’s new OAuth-like1 API keys and auth delegation. This is long overdue, and, in addition to providing security benefits, will eliminate all those confusing session-expired errors (e.g. bug 1178814). After we deploy the change, all users will need to log back into MozReview’s Review Board2 instance. This time, rather than entering your Bugzilla credentials directly into Review Board, when you go to the “Log In” page, you’ll be redirected to BMO....
The other day I read about another new Mozilla project that decided to go with GitHub issues instead of our Bugzilla installation (BMO). The author’s arguments make a lot of sense: GitHub issues are much simpler and faster, and if you keep your code in GitHub, you get tighter integration. The author notes that a downside is the inability to file security or confidential bugs, for which Bugzilla has a fine-grained permission system, and that he’d just put those (rare) issues on BMO....
After languishing for a few years, Pulse got a burst of interest and development in 2014. Since I first heard of it, I’ve found the idea of a central message bus for the goings-on in Mozilla’s various systems rather intruiging, and I’m excited to have been able to grow it over the last year. Pulse falls into that class of problem that is a result of, to borrow from a past Mozilla leader, our tendency to make our lives difficult, that is, to work in the open....
Everyone loves statistics! Right? Right? Hello? tap tap feedback screech Well anyway, here are some numbers from BMO in 2014: BMO Usage: 33 243 new users registered 45 628 users logged in 23 063 users performed an action 160 586 new bugs filed 138 127 bugs resolved 100 194 patches attached BMO Development: 1 325 bugs filed 1 214 bugs resolved Conclusion: there are a lot of dedicated Mozillians out there!...
The second half of 2014 was spent finishing up some performance work and shifting into usability improvements, which will continue into 2015. More performance! By the end of 2014, we’d managed to pick most of the low-to-medium-hanging fruit in the world of Bugzilla server-side performance. The result is approximately doubling the performance of authenticated bug views. Here are graphs from January 2014 and October 2014: The server now also minifies and concatenates JavaScript and CSS files....
BMO currently supports five—count ’em, five—ways to search for bugs. Whenever you have five different ways to perform a similar function, you can be pretty sure the core problem is not well understood. Search has been rated, for good reason, one of the least compelling features of Bugzilla, so the BMO team want to dig in there and make some serious improvements. At our Portland get-together a couple weeks ago, we talked about putting together a vision for BMO....
I know lots of people are very anxious to see Mozilla’s new code-review tool. It’s been a harrowing journey, but we are finally knocking out our last few blockers for initial deployment (see tracking bug 1021929). While we sort those out, here’s something to whet your palate: a walk through the new review work flow.