[DECISION] Approve USD$10,800 for performing the upstream Bugzilla 6.0 release

Hello,

the following decision, which has been taken in private on 2023-05-16, by the former board, is now made public in accordance with our statutes.

Florian

the Board of Directors at the time of voting consists of 7 seat holders (not including deputies). In order to be quorate, the vote needs to have 1/2 or more of the Board of Directors members, which
gives 4.

A total of 5 Board of Directors members have participated in the vote.

The vote is quorate.

A quorum could be reached with a simple majority of 3 votes.

Result of vote: 5 approvals, 0 abstains, 0 disapprovals.
One deputy supports the motion.
Decision: The proposal has been accepted.

Where’s the text of the approved proposal?

Where is the release? :see_no_evil:

Dennis, you are in the QA chat where the progress has been discussed. You also know I’ve been trying to make this happen since 2019 through various ideas. You know this is far from trivial.

Part of the work went toward the preview release seen in Release of Bugzilla 5.2, 5.0.4.1, and 4.4.14 - Bugzilla

Dave has brought in a subcontractor to help with the last remaining bits.

Hi Ilmari, by “you” - you were referring to @dennisroczek , right?

Also, I’m interested in this not from a criticism perspective, but from the perspective of collabortation-with-out-of-TDF people and organizations perspective; and from the QA person who’se interested in Bugzilla features perspective.

So for the benefit of people who know absolutely nothing about this:

  • “Dave” is Dave Miller, the leader/manager/main guy in charge of Bugzilla.
  • Bugzilla has been a project of the Mozilla foundation. Written in perl, and coming into an essentially empty ecosystem at that time of FOSS, web-facing, issue tracking systems. It was great, but also limited, in a way which made it difficult to introduce features which today users might expect.
  • Bugzilla development has been sluggish for the past… 15 years, I guess you could say? For various reasons I’m not entirely familiar with. There is a long-awaited v6.0 planned which has a bunch of key features that kept being put off into a big refactor/rewrite in the future “we’ll do it in v6.0”. So, it’s almost there, but not quite there.
  • Apparently, a separate organization has spun off, out of Mozilla Corporation / Foundation, to continue work on Bugzilla.

That is what I know. But, @ilmari , can you fill us in on our involvement and what the “Zarro Boogs” corporation has been missing to finish up 6.0 and release it? Or, better yet, link to a document/post about that?

The contract has not been published. See my other mail regarding in- and outgoing correspondence and how to handle it.

We made a contract in 2023, but the delivery did not happen in time. We gave some extensions, but things didn’t work out as expected. However, there is no other service provider we could switch to, so the choice was to drop the project or find a solution with the current provider.

In the meantime, the procurement policy was developed. To not act contrary to that, it was decided to agree on a contractual fine for late delivery, something we will have also for the tendering process. I think, but not sure (I am replying during the long Easter weekend from the phone), 10% contractual sum per month late.

A brief summary of this was sent with one of the recent decisions published here. We expect delivery around late April.

No, nothing spun off Mozilla. Mozilla forked Bugzilla in ~2015 due to one Mozillian having artistic disagreements with upstream Bugzilla devs.

Justdave IT Consulting LLC is the company doing the work here. I’ve deliberately held off on writing a blog post until we have a release candidate in our hands. The blog post I linked above does tell about the state of the developer preview release.

But Bugzilla was a Mozilla project - how could it fork? Do you mean the upstream devs forked and left Mozilla?

Well, yes, but it doesn’t say anything about how other FOSS project / organizations are involved in making this happen. Also, looking at the Harmony repository - there seems to have been no commit for 7 months.

What contract? The minutes you posted don’t mention a contract. The decision voted on is simply not part of what you posted.

Delivery of what?

I can’t find details at a sufficient level, but from what I can gather, Mozilla owns the Bugzilla trademark, but the project itself has been operating as a collective one for ages. See the About page:

After a few days of bake time, this was released as Bugzilla 2.0 on September 19, 1998. Since then a large number of projects, both commercial and free have adapted it as their primary method of tracking software defects. In April of 2000, Terry handed off control of the Bugzilla project to Tara Hernandez. Under Tara’s leadership, some of the regular contributors were coerced into taking more responsibility, and Bugzilla began to truly become a group effort. In July of 2001, facing lots of distraction from her “real job,” Tara handed off control to Dave Miller, who is still in charge as of this writing.

Mozilla’s fork doesn’t care about being a generally useful project, for example regarding branding. I hope they would reconsider and merge with upstream again, but it might be too late.

The non-profit for Bugzilla was only established in 2023.

If we look at GitHub’s API output, the Bugzilla organisation was created in 2014 while Mozilla B-Team was created in 2016.

The minutes are about accepting a budget proposal. There was no separate meeting to accept the contract.

The delivery of the topic of this thread, Bugzilla 6.

Hi Ilmari,

Yes, you are right. I do know that there is an ongoing merge and even the foundation was paying some devs for some amount. At least I do know some differences between the fork (SSO, graphical stuff, mail stuff, etc.) as I do also seldom use a Mozilla Bugzilla account for Thunderbird tickets.

What is missing here: the BoD never published neither the amount of money of a contract nor especially never in an ongoing process. Hence, my question: where is the release? I’m not talking about the contract details, but releasing the BoD-Vote which was made nearly 2 years ago for a contract about (keep it easy, say) 10-20 working days, and it is still not fulfilled. Not sure about nitpicking here, might be technical or political problems, but my customers at work would be angry.

It is here: [DECISION] Approve USD$10,800 for performing the upstream Bugzilla 6.0 release