Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>]

Hello all!

I'm bringing some fresh news about our bugzilla with 1015 opened bugs.
It's alive here:

http://bugs.sourcemage.ru/

I see it much easier to port all chili bugs back into it, since its
database is much bigger, and all the things we have (history, bug
references, release process and so on) can be kept as is. I've started
that work today, and don't think it will take too long.

You can login with your old credentials -- they should work just fine.
Password reminding service also works well, so if you don't remember
your password, just click on the appropriate link at the top right.

>From what I have seen there's nothing wrong with bugzilla, really.
Period.

That red shining[0] (yes, I mean "today it's fun -- tomorrow gone"
thing) which has happened to us ruined a lot in the distro, and it hurt
damn enough our core subsystem -- the bug-tracker. The bug-tracker with
correct notifications, IRC bot integration and deeply integrated
release process for every part of the project -- we've lost it.
Too bad.

And this is not going to happen twice.

There should be understanding that anything in the world needs
maintenance. You *have* to spend your time to move forward along with
the world -- developers which produce the software, hackers which
hack it, security experts and developers again which fix it and
release new versions, hardware manufacturers that allow better scaling
on upgraded CPUs, HDDs, and so on.
OR don't touch it.

You can't just drop it and make sure it will work for years without an
issue. But a well-supported, active product with a big auditory (both
developers and users) can survive. The projects like Mozilla, Linux
kernel, FreeBSD and even RedHat prove it every day[1]. Others choose
Trac or Redmine or Jira or Mantis or Roundup or anything else. But
there is no sane reason just to switch to another bug-tracking system
without any good *plan* and proper migration procedure. Personally I'm
against such destructive and pointless decisions. And yes, it's not
correct to blame a product just because you have no time to perform
some optimizations or tune it, or tune a web-server, a database
server or anything else. BTW, Drupal is still in active development.

Bugzilla is well-designed and it fits our development cycle just fine.

So what was the upgrade path?

Well, I started with the previous version of the bugzilla spell in our
stable grimoire. Version 3.2.2 is it. And it was the last known version
for bugs.sourcemage.org.

Next, it took me 5 or 6 hours to read the docs and analyze further
upgrading plan. It wasn't pretty hard though:

1. First of all, I needed to update all required perl modules to the
most recent versions available (you will see the updates and new spells
for missing modules in test soon)

2. Then, I tried to set up version 3.2.2 with the latest dump David
gave me. It didn't have CREATE TABLE entries, so I had to init the db
schema first and drop all test entries bugzilla created with an empty
database. Then I loaded the dump and created a "good" one via this:

> mysqldump --complete-insert --add-drop-table --disable-keys
> --lock-tables --triggers --routines -p ...

3. Then, the upgrading path step-by-step was as the following:

3.2.2 -> 3.2.10 -> 3.4 -> 3.4.14 -> 3.6 -> 3.6.13 -> 4.0 -> 4.0.18

4. While doing the above, you have to read release notes for every
release carefully and follow the regular upgrading notes. And of course
there were some fixes-by-hand for proper qw() usage and a couple of
syntax errors. Learn Perl basics if you face these as big troubles
(I did so back in 2003).

5. There were some issues about non-existent users and descriptions for
the fields that are used in main tables:

> ERROR: There are invalid values for the assigned_to column in the bugs
> table. (These values do not exist in the profiles table, in the userid
> column.) Before continuing with checksetup, you will need to fix these
> values, either by deleting these rows from the database, or changing
> the values of assigned_to in bugs to point to valid values in
> profiles.userid. The bad values from the bugs.assigned_to column are:
> 514
> 
> ERROR: There are invalid values for the reporter column in the bugs
> table. (These values do not exist in the profiles table, in the userid
> column.) Before continuing with checksetup, you will need to fix these
> values, either by deleting these rows from the database, or changing
> the values of reporter in bugs to point to valid values in
> profiles.userid. The bad values from the bugs.reporter column are: 268
> 
> ERROR: There are invalid values for the who column in the longdescs
> table. (These values do not exist in the profiles table, in the userid
> column.) Before continuing with checksetup, you will need to fix these
> values, either by deleting these rows from the database, or changing
> the values of who in longdescs to point to valid values in
> profiles.userid. The bad values from the longdescs.who column are: 176,
> 268

You have to fix them by hand, too.

4.0 is a supported branch, and .18 revision was released less than a
month ago. No problems so far. But if you find one, drop me a message,
I'll try to fix it ASAP.

Some notes about the setup:

* it's running on my Xen VM with 1GB RAM under 2 vm cores: Xeon E31225
@ 3.10GHz on a 5GB HDD image
* it's running under LigHTTPD 1.4.35 and MariaDB 5.5.41
* and what's more important, it's running Source Mage GNU/Linux
installed from the latest chroot and upgraded to 0.62-2 stable grimoire
with 177 spells cast (dom0 is running up-to-date SMGL as well, heh)

The TODO list is not big, but still:

* lock down inactive developer accounts
* tune templates/css to make it fit the SMGL style
* upgrade to 5.0 (or 5.2) once it's out (hopefully, this year; since it
will introduce markdown support, which would be quite handy to use)

At the end, I vote for getting back to bugzilla and putting it as our
bug-tracker along with the new website[2], speaking of which, yet
another month has passed over, and we still do not have neither a proxy
or a simple redirect nor a basic server setup to prove the world we're
afloat and not stinking. Any news on this one?

Thanks!

[0] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/Ruby.html
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla
[2] http://beta.sourcemage.ru/

--
Vlad Glagolev <stealth AT tiberian.ru>

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