170065 - We need a way to get Bugzilla to tell us its version number

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Administration, task, P3)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

When trawling through all the Bugzillas on the web recently, I had to use
several tricks to find out what version of Bugzilla people were running, because
sometimes it was customised so much that it wasn't visible in the UI at the top
of the buglist page. 

One of the CGIs should have a way, which can't be disabled by editing templates,
of sending a user version information. It should be easy for sites which don't
want it to remove it, in the same way that you can change your FTP server's
banner message, but it shouldn't be possible to remove it "by accident", when
customising.

What do you guys think?

Gerv

Comment 1

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

I disagree on 'forcing' this. You can get the info from teh template version, or
just from looking at the page, usually.

I do think that the default header template should include a version string
similar to what bmo uses (in the small font), suplicating the large one in the
table, in order to encourage version reporting when people add their own logo.

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

You can figure it out from looking at the page, but only if the page hasn't been
customised too much. And the template versions have very little correlation with
the Bugzilla version.

I'd agree with the change to the header template, but it would be extremely
useful to be able to write a script which, when given a list of Bugzilla URLs,
returned a list of versions.

Gerv

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

bbaetz: why do you disagree with having a mechanism for this? Do you think it's
a security risk?

Gerv

Comment 4

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

gerv: Possibly. Having was is bascially a backdoor way to get at the version
also doesn't make me feel that good about this (yes, even if we document it. We
all now how many people read the docs)

We now dislcose the version via the default header. I think that thats good
enough. If admins don't want it shown, then they can easily remove it, and its
obvious that its being shown anyway.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

OK, then...

Gerv

Comment 6

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

clearing milestone on all DUPLICATE/WONTFIX/WORKSFORME/INVALID so they'll show
up as untriaged if they get reopened.  "Jiminy Cricket!" for the filters (and I
don't care if it's spelled wrong ;)

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Reopening. As esr points out, this would be very useful for remote clients.

Gerv

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Spoke too soon. 

The CVS versions of the exported Bugzilla config templates contain both
maintainer and version. However, the versions on bugzilla.mozilla.org do not -
hence my confusion - presumably because they are pre-checkin experimental ones.

The new versions should be picked up when b.m.o. upgrades to the tip.

Nothing to see here, move along...

Gerv