Bugzilla

Last updated
Bugzilla
Original author(s) Terry Weissman
Developer(s) Mozilla Foundation
Initial releaseAugust 26, 1998;24 years ago (1998-08-26) [1]
Stable release
5.0.6 (February 9, 2019;3 years ago (2019-02-09) [2] ) [±]

4.4.13 (February 16, 2018;4 years ago (2018-02-16) [2] ) [±]

Contents

Preview release 5.1.2 (February 16, 2018;4 years ago (2018-02-16) [3] ) [±]
Repository
Written in Perl
Operating system Cross-platform
Available in Multiple languages
Type Bug tracking system
License Mozilla Public License
Website www.bugzilla.org

Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

Released as open-source software by Netscape Communications in 1998, it has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Bugzilla is used, among others, by the Mozilla Foundation, WebKit, Linux kernel, FreeBSD, [4] KDE, Apache, Eclipse and LibreOffice. [5] Red Hat uses it, but is gradually migrating its product to use Jira. [6] [7] It is also self-hosting. [8]

History

Bugzilla was originally devised by Terry Weissman in 1998 for the nascent Mozilla.org project, as an open source application to replace the in-house system then in use at Netscape Communications for tracking defects in the Netscape Communicator suite. Bugzilla was originally written in Tcl, but Weissman decided to port it to Perl before its release as part of Netscape's early open-source code drops, in the hope that more people would be able to contribute to it, given that Perl seemed to be a more popular language at the time. [9]

Bugzilla 2.0 was the result of that port to Perl, and the first version was released to the public via anonymous CVS. In April 2000, Weissman handed over control of the Bugzilla project to Tara Hernandez. Under her leadership, some of the regular contributors were coerced into taking more responsibility, and Bugzilla development became more community-driven. In July 2001, facing distraction from her other responsibilities in Netscape, Hernandez handed control to Dave Miller, who was still in charge as of 2020. [10]

Bugzilla 3.0 was released on May 10, 2007 and brought a refreshed UI, an XML-RPC interface, custom fields and resolutions, mod_perl support, shared saved searches, and improved UTF-8 support, along with other changes.

Bugzilla 4.0 was released on February 15, 2011 and Bugzilla 5.0 was released in July 2015.

Timeline

Bugzilla's release timeline: [11]

Bugzilla

Requirements

Bugzilla's system requirements include:

Currently supported database systems are MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQLite. Bugzilla is usually installed on Linux using the Apache HTTP Server, but any web server that supports CGI such as Lighttpd, Hiawatha, Cherokee can be used. Bugzilla's installation process is command line driven and runs through a series of stages where system requirements and software capabilities are checked.

Design

The life cycle of a Bugzilla bug Bugzilla Lifecycle color-aqua.svg
The life cycle of a Bugzilla bug

While the potential exists in the code to turn Bugzilla into a technical support ticket system, task management tool, or project management tool, Bugzilla's developers have chosen to focus on the task of designing a system to track software defects.

Zarro Boogs

Bugzilla returns the string "zarro boogs found" instead of "0 bugs found" when a search for bugs returns no results. [12] "Zarro Boogs" is intended as a 'buggy' statement itself (a misspelling of "zero bugs") [12] [13] and is thus a meta-statement about the nature of software debugging, implying that even when no bugs have been identified, some may exist.

The following comment is provided in the Bugzilla source code to developers who may be confused by this behaviour:

Zarro Boogs Found
This is just a goofy way of saying that there were no bugs found matching your query. When asked to explain this message, Terry Weissman (an early Bugzilla developer) had the following to say:
I've been asked to explain this ... way back when, when Netscape released version 4.0 of its browser, we had a release party. Naturally, there had been a big push to try and fix every known bug before the release. Naturally, that hadn't actually happened. (This is not unique to Netscape or to 4.0; the same thing has happened with every software project I've ever seen.) Anyway, at the release party, T-shirts were handed out that said something like "Netscape 4.0: Zarro Boogs". Just like the software, the T-shirt had no known bugs. Uh-huh. So, when you query for a list of bugs, and it gets no results, you can think of this as a friendly reminder. Of *course* there are bugs matching your query, they just aren't in the bugsystem yet...
— Terry Weissman
From The Bugzilla Guide – 2.16.10 Release: Glossary [14]

WONTFIX

WONTFIX is used as a label on issues in Bugzilla and other systems. [15] It indicates that a verified issue will not be addressed for one of several possible reasons including fixing would be too expensive, complicated or risky. [16] [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

Gecko is a browser engine developed by Mozilla. It is used in the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, and many other projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Firebird (database server)</span> Relational database management system

Firebird is an open-source SQL relational database management system that support Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS and other Unix platforms. The database forked from Borland's open source edition of InterBase in 2000 but the code has been largely rewritten since Firebird 1.5.

about is an internal URI scheme implemented in various Web browsers to reveal internal state and built-in functions. It is an IANA officially registered scheme, and is standardized.

Mozilla Firefox has features that allow it to be distinguished from other web browsers, such as Chrome and Internet Explorer.

The history of the Mozilla Application Suite began with the release of the source code of the Netscape suite as an open source project. Going through years of hard work, Mozilla 1.0 was eventually released on June 5, 2002. Its backend code base, most notably the Gecko layout engine, has become the foundation of a number of applications based on Mozilla, including the Mozilla Foundation's flagship product Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. While the suite is no longer a formal Mozilla product, its development and maintenance is continued as the SeaMonkey community project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla Application Suite</span> Discontinued Internet suite

The Mozilla Application Suite is a discontinued cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It was based on the source code of Netscape Communicator. The development was spearheaded by the Mozilla Organization from 1998 to 2003, and by the Mozilla Foundation from 2003 to 2006.

Open-source software development (OSSD) is the process by which open-source software, or similar software whose source code is publicly available, is developed by an open-source software project. These are software products available with its source code under an open-source license to study, change, and improve its design. Examples of some popular open-source software products are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium, Android, LibreOffice and the VLC media player.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crash reporter</span> System software that identify and report crash details

A crash reporter is usually a system software whose function is to identify reporting crash details and to alert when there are crashes, in production or on development / testing environments. Crash reports often include data such as stack traces, type of crash, trends and version of software. These reports help software developers- Web, SAAS, mobile apps and more, to diagnose and fix the underlying problem causing the crashes. Crash reports may contain sensitive information such as passwords, email addresses, and contact information, and so have become objects of interest for researchers in the field of computer security.

Mork is a computer file format used by several email clients and web browsers produced by Netscape, and later, Mozilla Foundation. It was developed by David McCusker with the aim of creating a minimal database replacement that would be reliable, flexible, and efficient, and use a file format close to plain text.

This article is a comparison of issue tracking systems that are notable, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, as well as asset management systems. The comparison includes client-server application, distributed and hosted systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network Security Services</span> Collection of cryptographic computer libraries

Network Security Services (NSS) is a collection of cryptographic computer libraries designed to support cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server applications with optional support for hardware TLS/SSL acceleration on the server side and hardware smart cards on the client side. NSS provides a complete open-source implementation of cryptographic libraries supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and S/MIME. NSS releases prior to version 3.14 are tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. Since release 3.14, NSS releases are licensed under GPL-compatible Mozilla Public License 2.0.

GNATS is the GNU project's issue-tracking software.

Jira is a proprietary issue tracking product developed by Atlassian that allows bug tracking and agile project management.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla</span> Free and open-source software community, developer of Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tara Hernandez</span> Software developer and open source contributor

Tara Hernandez is a professional software developer, and veteran open source contributor, who developed procedures and tools at several Silicon Valley companies. She was an early promoter of what came to be known as the Continuous Integration revolution. As shown in the documentary Code Rush, she was the manager of Netscape Navigator development at Netscape Communications Corporations, and worked on the preparation of the original Mozilla code for public release, which led to the development of the Firefox browser. She has also worked as a Release Team Manager at Blue Martini software, Senior Infrastructure Engineer and Team Lead at Pixar Animation Studios, Senior Engineering Manager at Lithium Technologies, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, and worked as a Senior Engineering Manager at Google. Tara is currently employed by MongoDB as Vice President of R&D Productivity, where her role is to lead the development of engineering CI/CD systems, builds of various MongoDB software on 40+ platforms, and the performance tooling team.

References

  1. ↑ "New version of "Bugzilla" (the mozilla.org bugsystem) – with source!". netscape.public.mozilla.announce. Retrieved 2011-01-28.
  2. 1 2 "[ 2019 Feb 09 ] Release Information". 2019-02-09. Retrieved 2019-05-15.
  3. ↑ "[ 2018 Feb 16 ] Release of Bugzilla 5.1.2, 5.0.4, and 4.4.13". 2018-02-16. Retrieved 2018-02-24.
  4. ↑ "Announcement of Migration from GNATS to Bugzilla on the FreeBSD mailing list". Bugzilla supports finer granularity for categories and keywords and over time we will adopt more of these, making it easier to filter bugs into specific target areas. It is now easy for multiple people to track a single bug, without having to have them assigned to custom mailing lists, add attachments to bugs, and so on. Many features that people expect from a modern bug tracker are simply not present in GNATS.
  5. ↑ "Installation List". bugzilla.org.
  6. ↑ "[CentOS-devel] RHEL moving to issues.redhat.com only long term" . Retrieved 2022-04-19.
  7. ↑ "CentOS Community Newsletter, April 2022 – Blog.CentOS.org" . Retrieved 2022-04-19.
  8. ↑ "Reporting Bugs". Bugzilla. Bugzilla. 31 December 2014. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
  9. ↑ "Brief History". Development Roadmap. Mozilla.org. Retrieved 2006-11-22.
  10. ↑ "Developer Profiles". Bugzilla Website. Mozilla.org. Retrieved 2013-07-02.
  11. ↑ "Release Dates". Release Information. Mozilla.org. Retrieved 2011-03-31.
  12. 1 2 "Bugzilla Guide glossary entry for Zarro Boogs Found". Glossary. Bugzilla.org. Retrieved 2008-04-21.
  13. ↑ Coined by Michael Toy as explained by Tara Hernandez in the PBS documentary Code Rush . Event occurs at 18:21.
  14. ↑ "Glossary". www.bugzilla.org.
  15. ↑ "Bug Status WONTFIX - openSUSE". en.opensuse.org. Retrieved 9 May 2018.
  16. ↑ "What to do and what not to do in Bugzilla". Archived from the original on 2018-06-29. Retrieved 2018-05-09.
  17. ↑ "Bug Status WONTFIX". Archived from the original on 2018-06-29. Retrieved 2018-05-09.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.