Hacking for Christ

Bugzilla API 0.3 Released

Version 0.3 of the Bugzilla REST API has been released. New in this version:

• name=value search for arbitrary fields; e.g "&cf_mycustomfield=somevalue"
• All timestamps are now in UTC, ISO 8601 format
• Support for OPTIONS
• Access-Control-Allow-Origin header now on all responses (permits cross-site requests)
• Support for downloading bug data for multiple bugs, in full, in a single request (see docs for search to find out how)
• Text searches now default to "contains_all" (as substrings, space-sep)
• Initial support for decent error codes - however, don't rely on them not changing!

Compatibility Notes:

• Note that the timestamps format change is backwardly-incompatible.
• All API capabilities now work against bugzilla.mozilla.org, now that it's been upgraded and patched.
• An advance warning: in the next release, the Configuration object's "groups" hash will change to be keyed by ID rather than name (and so also the "id" field will disappear to be replaced by a "name" field).

File bugs | Feedback and discussion.

Commit Access Policy Draft

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.

Firefox 5th Birthday Party - London

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.

Gerv Status 2009-11-13

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.

IE 8 and the Public Suffix List

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:

• The IE list contains typos (I'm fairly sure about most of these):
  • aeroport.ci (aéroport.ci)
  • ciesqyn.pl (cieszyn.pl)
  • golgow.pl (glogow.pl)
  • udmautia.ru (udmurtia.ru)
  • prindipe.st (principe.st)
  • edunte.tn (edunet.tn)
  • cherrnigov.ua (chernigov.ua)
• The .aero, .pro and .museum gTLDs have a large number of reserved subdomains; these aren't recognised.
• There is likewise no attempt to deal with the subdivided complexities of Italy (.it), Japan (.jp) and Norway (.no).

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.