Zarro boogs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zarro boogs is a facetious metastatement about the state of software in development. Bug trackers, used to monitor the state of problems with a software project, readily describe how many bugs are outstanding. The response "zarro boogs" is intended as a buggy statement itself, implying that even when no bugs have been identified, software is still likely to contain bugs that haven't been identified yet.
[edit] Bugzilla bug tracking software
By design, the bug tracking software Bugzilla is programmed to return the string "zarro boogs found" instead of "0 bugs found" when a search for bugs returns no results.
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
