Currently, Mozilla has a large number of code trees in various source code management systems, many of which have differing requirements for access. This is confusing and difficult for both developers and administrators. This document is the first draft of a vision for what a unified commit access policy might look like. Having a clear commit access policy makes the lives of developers and administrators alike easier. ...
This new unified Commit Policy is likely to need careful review and improvement; I've been working on this for a while now but I'm still sure I haven't got it right first time. Comments welcome in mozilla.governance.
It's a bit last minute, but the Firefox 5th Birthday Party in London will be happening this Thursday in collaboration with OpenSoho at their monthly event. It's at the Hub Culture Pavilion, a collaborative workspace at 49 Carnaby Street, Soho (map) from 6.30pm onwards.
The cost is normally £5, but you can use the discount code "mozillavip" to sign up for free - there are 50 places available for Firefox fans. William is coming over from Paris to join us; hope to see you there too :-) If you are a London-based geek, please feel free to publicise this to other Firefox fans via your blog, Twitter or whatever.
Status 2009-11-13. Highlight: finally managed to release REST API 0.2! Although it only works fully against bugzilla-stage-tip.mozilla.org at the moment, it will work on bugzilla.mozilla.org after the upgrade, which is now scheduled for this Sunday. But this is good enough for people to test things on a relevant bug non-critical data set.
It has become important in recent years for web browsers to know something about the de facto 'shape' of the DNS - e.g. to tell the difference between co.com (someone's domain) and co.uk (a registry-specified suffix under which people register domains). This is used to stop cookie leakage between domains, to highlight the important parts of a domain name, and for other things too.
To do this, Mozilla started the Public Suffix List project, a cross-browser initiative which tries to maintain such a map. This list is used by Opera and Chrome/Chromium. Thanks to some heavy lifting at the start of the project by some very hard-working volunteers, the list is pretty comprehensive (although we tweak it regularly).
IE 8 also needs to know this type of information, to power things like its domain highlighting in the URL bar. The excellent Eric Lawrence's post on the IE blog details what they use it for and how their code works. You can see there the algorithm that IE used in all versions prior to IE 8.
In IE 8, they made changes to improve the accuracy of the algorithm. Sadly, although the licensing on the data is designed to enable them to, they have chosen not to switch to using the Public Suffix List. Instead, they have kept their old heuristic but added a set of exceptions - ietldlist.xml, which is bundled with IE 8. (If you have IE 8, you can see it by visiting the URL res://urlmon.dll/ietldlist.xml).
This is sad a) because it makes the browsers inconsistent with one another and b) because IMO their algorithm and list combination does not produce results as good as the Public Suffix List. Here are some issues:
That's not to say we don't have things to look into either; I've filed a bug to follow up the places where IE has an entry that we don't.
I've written a Perl script implementing both algorithms (PSL courtesy of the regdom-libs project) so people can see the differences for a particular domain. Note that I can't redistribute ietldlist.xml, so you'll need to obtain your own copy of that before the script will run.
I hope Microsoft will consider using the PSL for the next release of IE, so we gain cross-browser consistency and can all work together to maintain a single map of the DNS. We are happy to work with them to make that possible.
Version 0.2 of the Bugzilla REST API has been released. New in this version:
Note that these new capabilities will not be available on the copy of the API pointed at bugzilla.mozilla.org until the upgrade :-( But in the mean time, you can test them on the staging server. Although that seems very slow at the moment.
I consider this the first version of the API with which you should be able to write a capable Bugzilla client of some sort. Let me know if you find stuff missing which would be required for this usage.
Lastly, there is now a Bugzilla component for you to file bugs in :-)
For those of you waiting for the official release of Bugzilla API 0.2: it's still blocked on getting some small support patches on to bugzilla-stage-tip.mozilla.org or bugzilla.mozilla.org. Despite my begging and pleading, it's looking like this won't happen until the upgrade to Bugzilla 3.4, which keeps getting postponed :-(
Someone added a comment to a previous blog post about this, but I think it deserves some wider publicity - particularly as I commented on the need for this sort of thing in mpt's usability talk at LUGRadio Live.
Pongo is a poor man's usability lab - it records the screen, the mic and the webcam and wraps them all up into an Ogg file for review. Here's the original blog post from the author (the original was in Python, but it got ported to C).
If there are usability people who could pick this up and take it a bit further, e.g. to the stage of being packaged for Debian and Ubuntu, that would be amazing.
I get mail on a number of contact email addresses @mozilla.org. Sometimes, people wrongly use these addresses to send support requests (for which I have a canned reply) or praise. Most of the praise is just "Wow, thanks!" but occasionally something comes in which is a bit out of the ordinary:
Dear dear guys and gals of Firefox s/w and bug fixes...THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU !!!!!
Thank you all for releasing me from the handcuffs, tyranny, vile and cat-o'-nine-tails of Microsoft Explorer and all its attendant BS, hype and unimaginable insane (and foreseeable!) problems!
In my heart and soul you are ALL heros (and hero-esses?!) and stars in the internet firmament !!!
May your light shine forever in the integalactic realm of truth, righteousness and ALL that is GOOD!
More power to your keyboarding souls and fingertips! :o)
Give yourselves (and/or each other [more fun, that!] :oD ) a great big hug!!!
(...or 'high-fives' if you're not yet that close! LOL )Bless you all - may your souls forever surf the infinite with brightness with freedom of spirit and goodness!
Cheers,
<name removed>
I'm off to shine a bit more light into the integalactic realm of truth and righteousness...