General

Shorter release cycle

BugJail beta is coming along nicely, and starting from 2020.1 we switched to a much shorter release cycle and more frequent releases.

The principle is that as soon as a new major feature is ready for feedback, we ship a new version with it, instead of holding out until some pre-defined scheduled date or version number.

Features

Support for Java 9 through to Java 13

Finally here! BugJail adds official support for Java 9, Java 10, Java 11, Java 12 and Java 13.

As always, let us know how it goes. Especially in the case of explosions.

Note: The Java 9+ module system still prints a couple of warning lines when starting up. Those are harmless and a workaround to avoid them will be available in a later release.

New internal error handling

Error handling of BugJail's own exceptions during runtime capturing has been redesigned.

Now if BugJail's code itself throws an exception, then the unfinished/corrupt capture batch is cleanly aborted. This avoids the local processing server throwing exceptions from the unfinished/corrupt capture batch (which in previous versions used to bounce back to the agent and cause a whole lot of mess). Also further capturing from that thread is now gracefully stopped, which eliminates repeated exceptions and stack traces.

The new error handling works on a per-thread basis, which means that if capturing from some unimportant background thread explodes, you'll see just one exception and can continue capturing from all other threads.

Linux packaging changes to "standalone" TAR.GZ

Instead of having separate DEB and RPM packages, and leaving Arch/Manjaro/etc people out in the cold, BugJail 2020.1 switched to a single TAR.GZ packaging that should work for everybody. The new packaging is "standalone", no installation needed. Just unpack wherever you want and then run the BugJail executable.

And if you do want to get the DEB and RPM packages back, please let us know.

Note: The first cut of the new packaging doesn't have yet any desktop environment integrations beyond setting the icon, but things like registering BugJail to application launcher will be coming at later versions.

Windows packaging adds "standalone" ZIP

Similar to the new Linux packaging, we've added a "standalone" ZIP as an alternative for Windows. No installation needed, just unpack wherever you want, and then run the BugJail.exe executable. Works without being an Administrator too.