Where I’m @

20051122

More Adventures with Bugzilla
We were all set to post another bug, esp since we didn’t see a dupe filed anywhere, but saved face by remembering that confirming a bug in an app requires confirming that the bug is not in the infrastructure. In this case, it was an ActiveState perl 5.8.6.811 issue. Whenever a bug was filed in our instance of Bugzilla, we got the bug properly filed, but a bunch or warning spew showed up at the top of the confirm screen:

Use of uninitialized value in integer addition (+) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 76. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in integer multiplication (*) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 76. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in integer multiplication (*) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 76. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in pack at [path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line
67. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in pack at [path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line
67. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in integer addition (+) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 68. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in integer addition (+) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 69. referer: post_bug.cgi
Use of uninitialized value in integer addition (+) at
[path/to/perl]/lib/Time/Local.pm line 67. referer: post_bug.cgi 

Or something like that. To be honest, we neglected to copy our exact barf down and had to cadge the above from a newsgroup post on the same matter. Which is where we found that ActiveState’s version of Time/local.pm was the problem. Using ppm to find and then install the newer version didn’t quite work because the install was only to site/lib and html/site/lib, and we had to manually stick it into root/lib for the barf to get cleaned up. Using barf sprinkles, we assume.

posted by Tk at 18:03 • • sealed in amber

20051121

Further Notes on Installing and Running Bugzilla

1. Our scheduled task to run collectstats.pl each morning was failing with an error code of 0x2 (thank you M$ — or would it be perl? — for the clear errors). Turned out, after running the task on a command prompt, that the perl script was unable to find a particular library. Searching on the string “perl can’t locate module bugzilla::search” got us the answer right in the Bugzilla release docs. It seems that we still had two executables of perl hanging ’round; backing them up and renaming perl5.6.8.exe to perl.exe did the trick. Now to see what unintended side effects that has.
2. We did some very rudimentary customization of the pages by changing the header image to the same banner as is on the CLS website and changing the front page image (the electron-microscope pic of the ant was creepy to a colleague). In fact, we just referred to the web location of the CLS banner, so if it changes so will the bugzilla instance. These customizations are in [install directory]\skins\custom, and it’s only necessary to override what you want. How do you find the appropriate IDs and CLASSes? That would be in [install directory]\skins\standard.

posted by Tk at 11:20 • • sealed in amber

20051118

Notes on Installing Bugzilla
(We’re working from the excellent guide to installing Bugzilla for Windows posted on the Bugzilla site.)

The original target system had:

• Windows 2000 Server
• ActiveState perl 5.6.8
• MySQL 4.1.8

1. We installed ActiveState perl 5.8.6 successfully over 5.6.1, but reached problems when trying to install some required perl modules as described at the guide. The error message was “no suitable installation target found for package foo”, and googling that message didn't give a lot of help. Being a Windows user, our inclination is to scrape down to the bottom and build back up, so we uninstalled both versions of perl (it was not being used for anything else on the system) and installed 5.8.6 again. No love. This time, we decided to learn how to use PPM, with a little — gasp! — RTFM. Short version, we found that using describe in PPM would show us which version of a module we should be installing. You’d be surprised how well a module/package for Windows, as opposed to one for *nix, installs on a Windows server.

   We found on later module installs that PPM would not automatically search for the module. Only by executing search foo first could we then use install, and then by referring to the number in the search results list.

2. The guide shows that install GDGraph will install the prerequisite GDTextUtil, but that was not the case for us. We had to explicitly install GDTextUtil. This, even though our PPM settings said default behavior was to get prerequisites if they do not exist.

3. We could not find for the life of us the Net-LDAP-Express module shown as the last piece of the module install for Net::LDAP. (And we had had to add new repositories from ActiveState’s list of repositories in order just to find perl-ldap in the first place.)

4. We found and filed a bug with the good people at Bugzilla, describing an error thrown when we tried to delete the product named TestProduct without turning on the use of milestones. Hence we recommend turning on the use of milestones (usetargetmilestone on the params page) before trying to delete a product. It can be deleted, AFAWCT, but it’s just not nice to see errors when you’re trying to do something like that.

posted by Tk at 10:38 • • sealed in amber