The New "Crash Signature" Field in Bugzilla

Originally coming as a request from the Socorro team, we have been pushing for some time to get a better solution for connecting bugs to crash reports/stats than the bug summary - in the form of a separate "Crash Signature" Field in bug reports.

It wasn't just messy up to now for Socorro (crash-stats) to parse the signatures out of headers, we also had a number of bugs where the constraints on the summary length caused problems with adding multiple signatures or a very long signature - not to speak of making summaries hard to read for humans. All that should get solved with the new special-purpose field that also allows greater length of its content.

You might have noticed that this "Crash Signature" field has turned up in many products of Mozilla's Bugzilla in the last days, below the tracking/status/blocking flags on the right above the comments.

The syntax for entering signatures is similar to what we did put into summaries so far: a signature is listed as [@ crash::signature(params) ] - for multiple signatures, we prefer to use a new line for every signature to make the field more readable, though.

We're migrating over the contents from summaries to the new field, so you don't need to copy those manually - some of that happened already, but the script didn't catch all necessary bugs the first time it ran. Also, the work on Socorro to use the new field has not landed on production yet. Both should be done soon (within days), and then we can fully use the new field. Until then, it's best to leave the field alone and keep using the summary (though for those cases where the summary is too small, populating the new field right away is safe).

In the future, i.e. once Socorro uses the new field, we'll also be able to make summaries more human-readable, e.g. "[meta] EnterMethodJIT crashes" or something similar will be far easier on the eyes for bug 595351.

Thanks to everyone who worked and is still working on implementing that!