Bugzilla

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bugzilla

The Bugzilla interface
Developer:	Mozilla Foundation
Latest release:	2.23.3 / October 15, 2006
OS:	Cross-platform
Available language(s):	Multiple
Use:	Bugtracker
License:	Mozilla Public License
Website:	http://www.bugzilla.org/

Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project. Released as open source software by Netscape Communications in 1998, Bugzilla has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a defect tracker for both free software and proprietary products.

Bugzilla is licensed under the Mozilla Public License.

1 History
2 Requirements
3 Design
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] History

Bugzilla was originally written 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. Originally written in Tcl, Terry decided to port Bugzilla to Perl before its release as part of Netscape's early open source code drops, with the hopes that more people would be able to contribute to it as Perl seemed to be a more popular language at the time.^[1]

Bugzilla 2.0 was the result of that port to Perl, and the first version released to the public via anonymous CVS. In April 2000, Weissman handed off control of the Bugzilla project to Tara Hernandez. Under Tara's 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, Tara handed off control to Dave Miller, who is still in charge as of February 2007^[2].

[edit] Requirements

Bugzilla's system requirements include:

A compatible database management system;
A suitable release of Perl 5;
An assortment of Perl modules;
A compatible web server;
A suitable mail transfer agent, or any SMTP server.

Currently supported database systems are MySQL and PostgreSQL. Bugzilla is usually installed on Linux and runs using the Apache HTTP Server, but Microsoft Internet Information Services or any web server that supports CGI 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.

[edit] Design

Please help improve this article by expanding this section.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. Please remove this message once the section has been expanded.
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

The lifecycle 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. Mandated design requirements include:^[3]

the ability to run on freely available, open source tools. While Bugzilla development includes work to support commercial databases, tools, and operating systems, this is not intended to come at the expense of open source ones.
the maintenance of speed and efficiency at all costs. One of Bugzilla's major attractions to developers is its lightweight implementation and speed, so calls into the database are minimized whenever possible, data fetching is kept as light as possible, and generation of heavy HTML is avoided.
ANSI SQL calls and data types in queries and tables. database specific calls and datatypes are avoided whenever possible, and developers are encouraged to convert existing SQL calls and data types to ANSI SQL where possible.
browser agnosticism in HTML and form generation, including cleaning up the HTML output of Bugzilla, and following all applicable Web standards.

Bugzilla's notion of a "bug" is very general, and Bugzilla uses the term "bug" to track not only software bugs but also all other user-submitted tracking tickets; for instance, Mozilla.org and the MediaWiki project use it to track feature requests as well. Bugs can be submitted by anybody, and will be assigned to a particular developer. Various status updates for each bug are allowed, together with user notes and bug examples.

[edit] References

^ Brief History. Development Roadmap. Mozilla.org. Retrieved on November 22, 2006.
^ Developer Profiles. Bugzilla Website. Mozilla.org. Retrieved on February 17, 2007.
^ Design Principles. Development Roadmap. Mozilla.org. Retrieved on November 22, 2006.