Broadview Software has created two new VMs for the project's developers and testers to use as build farms for POSIX and Windows, respectively. This enables us to automate the daily snapshot builds and transfer them each day at approximately midnight GMT to the pre-release area for field testing.

At the moment, most of the Linux builds are available from the Snapshots page. Sergey will continue making his regular Linux builds available as a backup source. More news about other platforms and possibly other snapshot kits as the build farm develops.

The problem with the tracker.firebirdsql.org URL has now been resolved and old bookmarks should work again.

There is still a problem with Java that is preventing the creation of new accounts in the Tracker system: some point in the layering does not like the OpenJDK. Pavel is working on that. In the meantime, if you don't have a Tracker account and need to file a bug report, please subscribe to the Firebird-devel list and post the problem description there.

Firebird's Jira Tracker is now restored on the new VM, with data up to 5 December 2009. However, we have lost attachments from the last two years. Missing ticket headers from after Dec 5 will need to be reconstructed from notification messages.

The version of Jira is slightly newer than we had before, although it is not V.4.x, due to platform problems with the Tomcat layer. We now have some new features, including FishEye integration, already configured for the CORE project. Some reporting plug-ins may be missing: if so, it will take some forensics to detect which ones they were and whether they are compatible with the new setup. The Subversion and CVS integration plug-ins are installed and working.

Note that the URL is temporarily slightly different to what it was previously, so your old bookmark won't work properly. Once the re-licensing issues are sorted out, the URL will revert to the previous one.

This has been a difficult recovery. In short, we just didn't have the failure protection we thought we had and we failed to cover the unannounced disappearance of the project worker who set up Jira originally. The recovery task was achieved thanks to the huge effort and dedication of Pavel Cisar, who took on the task a month ago, single-handedly, as a "greenie". Some steps still remain to be done but the Tracker is open for business!