Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bugtracker 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, GNOME,
KDE, Apache, Red Hat, Eclipse and LibreOffice. It is also self-hosting.
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. 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
was still in charge as of 2013. Bugzilla 3.0 was released on May 10,
2007 and brought refreshed UI, XML-RPC interface, custom fields and
resolutions, mod_perl support, shared saved searches, improved UTF-8 support
and others. Bugzilla 4.0 was released on February
15, 2011. = Timeline=
Bugzilla's release timeline: 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, 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 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: The ability to run on freely available,
open-source tools. While Bugzilla development includes work to support
commercial databases, tools, and operating systems.
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.
Tickets. For instance, Mozilla.org uses it to track feature requests as well. In
this case items 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.
In practice, most Bugzilla projects allowing the public to file bugs—such as
the Bugzilla bug database for Bugzilla itself—assign all bugs to a gatekeeper,
whose job it is to assign responsibility and priority level.
Zarro Boogs By design, Bugzilla is programmed to
return the string "zarro boogs found" instead of "0 bugs found" when a search
for bugs returns no results. "Zarro Boogs" is a meta-statement about the
nature of software debugging. Bug tracking systems like Bugzilla readily
describe how many known 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 yet
been identified. 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 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. 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 See also
Comparison of issue-tracking systems References
External links Official website