mr mr cote

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.

Here’s your mid-year report from the offices, basements, and caverns of BMO! Performance This year we’re spending a lot of time on performance. As nearly everyone knows, Bugzilla’s an old Perl app from the early days of the Web, written way before all the technologies, processes, and standards of today were even dreamt of. Furthermore, Bugzilla (including BMO) has a very flexible extension framework, which makes broad optimizations difficult, since extensions can modify data at many points during the loading and transforming of data.

A large number of external applications have grown up around Bugzilla serving a variety of purposes. One thing many of these apps have in common is a need to get updates from Bugzilla. Unfortunately, the only way to get notifications of changes was, until recently, to poll Bugzilla. Everyone knows that polling is bad, particularly because it doesn’t scale well, but until recently there was no alternative. Thus I would like to introduce to the world Bugzfeed, a WebSocket app that allows you to subscribe to one or more bugs and get pushed notifications when they change.

Or, how to migrate to git using only three programming languages Another aspect of Bugzilla has been dragged, kicking & screaming, into the future! On March 11, 2014, the Bugzilla source moved to git.mozilla.org. We’re still mirroring to bzr.mozilla.org (more on that later), but the repository of record is now git, meaning it is the only place we accept new code. Getting over there was no small feat, so I want to record the adventure in the hopes that it can benefit someone else, and so I can look back some day and wonder why I put myself through these things.

This isn’t a traditional recipe or anything, just something I put together one day. When we visit Barbados, we usually find a place with a kitchen, for various reasons: I like cooking, eating out every night is expensive (particularly in Barbados) and, now that I have a child with an early bedtime, getting out is a little tricky. But since we only stay for a week or two, buying all the spices I would normally use in tomato sauce is wasteful, and I never think to bring some with me.

2013 was a pretty big year for BMO! I covered a bit in my last post on BMO, but I want to sum up just some of the things that the team accomplished in 2013 as well as to give you a preview of a few things to come. We push updates to BMO generally on a weekly basis. The changelog for each push is posted to glob’s blog and linked to from Twitter (@globau) and from BMO’s discussion forum, mozilla.

I went about the seemingly simple task of sharing a directory in OS X with an Ubuntu VMware box so that I could code in my main desktop and run under Linux. The simple sharing dialog is of course only the beginning of the work; after that, I needed to refresh VMware tools, since I had done several kernel upgrades. Well that turned into a few hours of flailing at a command line.

There’s been a lot of interest in improving Mozilla’s code-review process lately, so in that vein the BMO team has set up a ReviewBoard instance at https://reviewboard.allizom.org for testing and evaluation. ReviewBoard is a lot more useful than Splinter, so I suggest you try it out. One of the features I think will be most adored is proper interdiff support, made possible by the fact that ReviewBoard knows about the repo you’re working in.