Bugzilla Update

[mark]

Hi all,

First, I'm sorry for the delay in posting this and, in advance, quite sorry for the problem.

Bugzilla has died. In a rather messy and, unfortunately, irrecoverable way. The long story short is that, for historical reasons, it still ran on my personal server. I had a human-error incident with said server the other night and, alas, it was the kind of incident that ended with me accidentally deleting the server and all of its data.

Further unfortunately, I thought it was actually backed up on EBS (one of Amazon's storage systems). It wasn't. (Or well, more accurately, the root volume was -- so I still have /etc and such. But no actual /var/lib/mysql or /home.) I contacted Amazon to ask for help and they heroically tried, but it was to no avail.

In good news, we actually have substantially all of the data collected across our collected email accounts. We can recover things we want to keep, so very little is actually gone.

What's next? Well, we're going to take this time to take a step back and think about how we do bug/task/feature/etc management and how to fit that into the GitHub Issues system. Since we already use GitHub, there would be some advantages to having a centralized system that fits in with the rest of our workflow. (If you've got experience with GitHub Issues and have some advice, please let us know!)

More details will be coming sometime in the next week or two.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

So, once you guys have figured out what the next bug tracker thingy will be, how will you rebuild what you can of the bugs that were in Bugzilla? Will you even try, or just start from scratch? Obviously, you can't do all of them, and for "features we want to implement but haven't yet" you can just go through http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/tag/bugzilla:+migrated. But what about, say, the guts of the system that were marked for modernization that hadn't happened yet?

I have no actual need to know this, I'm just curious.

[denise]

As Mark says in the entry, we have most of the data. I'd say 'all' of the data, but I'm not 100% certain, although it's looking pretty likely.

We aren't going to put the whole bug database into the new tracker automatically, because of a combination of the data being there but not easily parsed and thus needing human intervention, and the advantages of a fresh start in not having to individually evaluate older items for "is this still applicable and is this bug still happening", but we have it.

[beatrice_otter]

Ah! Thank you.

[sophie]

Would you like me to set something up so that people can forward their Bugzilla email to a certain automated address, which would automatically put it into a format that could be usable? (It could even put it into a new Bugzilla database, if we want.) It's the sort of thing I could code while other things are looked into.

[edit: It could also automatically put the info into GitHub, say.]

[denise]

We have the data, thanks! And we aren't going to be automatically importing the whole bug db.

[sophie]

Okay, awesome. :)