1.1. Purpose and Scope of this Guide

This document was started on September 17, 2000 by Matthew P. Barnson after a great deal of procrastination updating the Bugzilla FAQ, which I left untouched for nearly half a year. After numerous complete rewrites and reformatting, it is the document you see today.

Bugzilla is simply the best piece of bug-tracking software the world has ever seen. This document is intended to be the comprehensive guide to the installation, administration, maintenance, and use of the Bugzilla bug-tracking system.

This release of the Bugzilla Guide is the 2.14 release. It is so named that it may match the current version of Bugzilla. The numbering tradition stems from that used for many free software projects, in which even-numbered point releases (1.2, 1.14, etc.) are considered "stable releases", intended for public consumption; on the other hand, odd-numbered point releases (1.3, 2.09, etc.) are considered unstable development releases intended for advanced users, systems administrators, developers, and those who enjoy a lot of pain.

Newer revisions of the Bugzilla Guide follow the numbering conventions of the main-tree Bugzilla releases, available at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla. Intermediate releases will have a minor revision number following a period. The current version of Bugzilla, as of this writing (August 10, 2001) is 2.14; if something were seriously wrong with that edition of the Guide, subsequent releases would receive an additional dotted-decimal digit to indicate the update (2.14.1, 2.14.2, etc.). Got it? Good.

I wrote this in response to the enormous demand for decent Bugzilla documentation. I have incorporated instructions from the Bugzilla README, Frequently Asked Questions, Database Schema Document, and various mailing lists to create it. Chances are, there are glaring errors in this documentation; please contact to correct them.