Calling all HTML5 and Bugzilla enthusiasts!

Earlier in the week, I went through the process of filing and fixing bugs 546338 and 546340, both related to fixing <a name> problems in Bugzilla. Once that was successful, I got the idea to do a major overhaul of the Bugzilla templates in order to upgrade them from HTML4 code to HTML5 code (sans presentational markup, which Bugzilla has a ton of). I’ve filed bugs 546838, 547171, 546353, 547311, and 547389 for this purpose.

After spending a few days attempting to accomplish something, under the very helpful and reassuring guidance of Max Kanat-Alexander, I realized that it was a bit much for one person to take on. The sheer number of instances of presentational markup (and I only got so far as looking at @align, @cellspacing, and @cellpadding) is quite overwhelming.

But then I thought: This would be a perfect series of bugs for ‘student-project‘; that is, the keyword used to attract open source students to specific bugs that they can tackle during a semester. If we can get a group of students together, along with myself and Max, we can probably accomplish this much quicker.

If you’re interested in helping out, or you know a student who may fit that description, drop by #mozwebtools on irc.mozilla.org and ping GPHemsley or mkanat.

Quick Bespin Update

A lot has happened since I last blogged about adding real tab support to Bespin. Since then, my code was merged into the main repository and things have taken off. I later tore apart a huge chunk of Bugzilla by way of sorting through and updating a lot of the old bugs, many of which had been on the books since before Bespin went public, or had been fixed a long time ago. I still have not sorted through all of them, and there are probably still a number of open bugs that fall into that latter category.

Since appointing myself the de facto Issue Manager (hat tip to amotsjonov for the link), I have been watching the incoming bugs like a hawk, and have determined that using the whiteboard to organize bugs has already become too unwieldy. Bespin needs to pop itself out of the Mozilla Labs product so that it can have components of its own. So I’ve filed a bug to that effect. I hope it will get approved and put in place soon, so that I can really attack all of the remaining unloved bugs and narrow down the focus of what there is to do.

Last week was also the first Bespin Status Meeting. After some technical difficulties getting our more foreign correspondents into the call, it went well. We discussed the near and far future of Bespin and what we plan to do. April is dogfood month, so we’re going to have to sort out the most glaring bugs and get the most important features implemented. That way, we’ll be able to use Bespin to edit Bespin. I’m looking forward to it.

Our next meeting is tomorrow. Though the agenda is not quite set yet, I do hope to discuss how things are running, and how to get them running even more smoothly. Perhaps I will chime back in after the meeting with more details.

Firefox Bugs Housekeeping

With the help of Henrik Skupin (whimboo) of the Mozilla QA Team, I’ve recently been going through the old Firefox 1.0 and 1.5 bugs and closing the ones that have outlived their usefulness. The ones whose current usefulness remains questionable, I’ve added a comment requesting more information, and tagged the whiteboard with “[closeme <date>]”, where <date> is a month from today, in YYYY-MM-DD format. (There is an ongoing discussion on mozilla.dev.quality regarding the use of this tag, and whether it should be removed once the bug is closed.) There are currently over 300 bugs filed against old Firefox versions, so I could use some help with this task, if anyone is willing (and able).

I’ve also taken it upon myself to go through and re-categorize recent bugs that have been filed with version “unspecified”, whenever possible. (Sometimes, there is not enough detail in the bug to determine which version it belongs under. Other times, it falls under multiple versions.) I’ve created a saved search (available to those with “editbugs” status) called “Recent Firefox Bugs Needing Version Sorting” to help simplify this process. (This link goes to the recreated, public version of the search. Visit your preferences to turn on my shared version.) I don’t know how important of a task this is, and I don’t do it too often, as the volume of new bugs of that nature is just overwhelming, but I’m sure it couldn’t hurt if other people chipped in to help.

So this is one of the first steps I’ve taken to try to make myself useful to as many people as possible. Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you, or if you’d like to help me in my process.