The Bugzilla Guide
Matthew P. Barnson
The Bugzilla Team
2.17.3 Development Release Edition
2003-01-02
This is the documentation for Bugzilla, the mozilla.org bug-tracking
system. Bugzilla is an enterprise-class piece of software that powers
issue-tracking for hundreds of organizations around the world,
tracking millions of bugs.
This documentation is maintained in DocBook 4.1.2 XML format. Changes
are best submitted as plain text or SGML diffs, attached to a bug
filed in the Bugzilla Documentation compontent.
This is a development version of this guide. Information in it is
subject to change before the 2.18 release of this guide (which will
correspond with the 2.18 release of Bugzilla).
_________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. About This Guide
1.1. Copyright Information
1.2. Disclaimer
1.3. New Versions
1.4. Credits
1.5. Document Conventions
2. Introduction
2.1. What is Bugzilla?
2.2. Why Should We Use Bugzilla?
3. Using Bugzilla
3.1. How do I use Bugzilla?
3.2. Hints and Tips
3.3. User Preferences
4. Installation
4.1. Step-by-step Install
4.2. Optional Additional Configuration
4.3. OS Specific Installation Notes
4.4. HTTP Server Configuration
4.5. Troubleshooting
5. Administering Bugzilla
5.1. Bugzilla Configuration
5.2. User Administration
5.3. Product, Component, Milestone, and Version Administration
5.4. Voting
5.5. Groups and Group Security
5.6. Bugzilla Security
5.7. Template Customization
5.8. Change Permission Customization
5.9. Upgrading to New Releases
5.10. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools
A. The Bugzilla FAQ
B. The Bugzilla Database
B.1. Modifying Your Running System
B.2. MySQL Bugzilla Database Introduction
C. Useful Patches and Utilities for Bugzilla
C.1. Apache mod_rewrite magic
C.2. Command-line Bugzilla Queries
D. Bugzilla Variants and Competitors
D.1. Red Hat Bugzilla
D.2. Loki Bugzilla (Fenris)
D.3. Issuezilla
D.4. Scarab
D.5. Perforce SCM
D.6. SourceForge
E. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents
Glossary
List of Examples
4-1. .htaccess files for Apache
5-1. Upgrading using CVS
5-2. Upgrading using the tarball
5-3. Upgrading using patches
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 1. About This Guide
1.1. Copyright Information
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in Appendix E.
--Copyright (c) 2000-2003 Matthew P. Barnson and The Bugzilla Team
If you have any questions regarding this document, its copyright, or
publishing this document in non-electronic form, please contact The
Bugzilla Team.
_________________________________________________________________
1.2. Disclaimer
No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted. Use
the concepts, examples, and other content at your own risk. This
document may contain errors and inaccuracies that may damage your
system, cause your partner to leave you, your boss to fire you, your
cats to pee on your furniture and clothing, and global thermonuclear
war. Proceed with caution.
All copyrights are held by their respective owners, unless
specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should
not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service
mark.
Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as
endorsements, with the exception of the term "GNU/Linux". We
wholeheartedly endorse the use of GNU/Linux in every situation where
it is appropriate. It is an extremely versatile, stable, and robust
operating system that offers an ideal operating environment for
Bugzilla.
You are strongly recommended to make a backup of your system before
installing Bugzilla and at regular intervals thereafter. If you
implement any suggestion in this Guide, implement this one!
Although the Bugzilla development team has taken great care to ensure
that all easily-exploitable bugs or options are documented or fixed in
the code, security holes surely exist. Great care should be taken both
in the installation and usage of this software. Carefully consider the
implications of installing other network services with Bugzilla. The
Bugzilla development team members, Netscape Communications, America
Online Inc., and any affiliated developers or sponsors assume no
liability for your use of this product. You have the source code to
this product, and are responsible for auditing it yourself to ensure
your security needs are met.
_________________________________________________________________
1.3. New Versions
This is the 2.17.3 version of The Bugzilla Guide. It is so named to
match the current version of Bugzilla. This version of the guide, like
its associated Bugzilla version is a development version. Information
is subject to change between now and when 2.18 is released. If you are
reading this from any source other than those below, please check one
of these mirrors to make sure you are reading an up-to-date version of
the Guide.
The newest version of this guide can always be found at bugzilla.org;
including documentation for past releases and the current development
version.
The documentation for the most recent stable release of Bugzilla can
also be found at The Linux Documentation Project.
The latest version of this document can always be checked out via CVS.
Please follow the instructions available at the Mozilla CVS page, and
check out the mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/docs/ subtree.
The Bugzilla Guide is currently only available in English. If you
would like to volunteer to translate it, please contact Dave Miller.
_________________________________________________________________
1.4. Credits
The people listed below have made enormous contributions to the
creation of this Guide, through their writing, dedicated hacking
efforts, numerous e-mail and IRC support sessions, and overall
excellent contribution to the Bugzilla community:
Matthew P. Barnson for the Herculaean task of pulling together the
Bugzilla Guide and shepherding it to 2.14.
Terry Weissman for initially writing Bugzilla and creating the README
upon which the UNIX installation documentation is largely based.
Tara Hernandez for keeping Bugzilla development going strong after
Terry left mozilla.org
Dave Lawrence for providing insight into the key differences between
Red Hat's customized Bugzilla, and being largely responsible for the
"Red Hat Bugzilla" appendix
Dawn Endico for being a hacker extraordinaire and putting up with my
incessant questions and arguments on irc.mozilla.org in #mozwebtools
Last but not least, all the members of the
netscape.public.mozilla.webtools newsgroup. Without your discussions,
insight, suggestions, and patches, this could never have happened.
Thanks also go to the following people for significant contributions
to this documentation (in no particular order):
Zach Liption, Andrew Pearson, Spencer Smith, Eric Hanson, Kevin
Brannen, Ron Teitelbaum, Jacob Steenhagen, Joe Robins, Gervase
Markham.
_________________________________________________________________
1.5. Document Conventions
This document uses the following conventions:
Descriptions Appearance
Warnings
Caution
Don't run with scissors!
Hint
Tip
Would you like a breath mint?
Notes
Note
Dear John...
Information requiring special attention
Warning
Read this or the cat gets it.
File Names filename
Directory Names directory
Commands to be typed command
Applications Names application
Prompt of users command under bash shell bash$
Prompt of root users command under bash shell bash#
Prompt of user command under tcsh shell tcsh$
Environment Variables VARIABLE
Emphasized word word
Term found in the glossary Bugzilla
Code Example
Beginning and end of paragraph
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 2. Introduction
2.1. What is Bugzilla?
Bugzilla is a bug- or issue-tracking system. Bug-tracking systems
allow individual or groups of developers effectively to keep track of
outstanding problems with their product. Bugzilla was originally
written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called TCL, to
replace a rudimentary bug-tracking database used internally by
Netscape Communications. Terry later ported Bugzilla to Perl from TCL,
and in Perl it remains to this day. Most commercial defect-tracking
software vendors at the time charged enormous licensing fees, and
Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the open-source crowd (with its
genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It is now the
de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are
measured.
Bugzilla boasts many advanced features. These include:
* Powerful searching
* User-configurable email notifications of bug changes
* Full change history
* Inter-bug dependency tracking and graphing
* Excellent attachment management
* Integrated, product-based, granular security schema
* Fully security-audited, and runs under Perl's taint mode
* A robust, stable RDBMS back-end
* Web, XML, email and console interfaces
* Completely customisable and/or localisable web user interface
* Extensive configurability
* Smooth upgrade pathway between versions
_________________________________________________________________
2.2. Why Should We Use Bugzilla?
For many years, defect-tracking software has remained principally the
domain of large software development houses. Even then, most shops
never bothered with bug-tracking software, and instead simply relied
on shared lists and email to monitor the status of defects. This
procedure is error-prone and tends to cause those bugs judged least
significant by developers to be dropped or ignored.
These days, many companies are finding that integrated defect-tracking
systems reduce downtime, increase productivity, and raise customer
satisfaction with their systems. Along with full disclosure, an open
bug-tracker allows manufacturers to keep in touch with their clients
and resellers, to communicate about problems effectively throughout
the data management chain. Many corporations have also discovered that
defect-tracking helps reduce costs by providing IT support
accountability, telephone support knowledge bases, and a common,
well-understood system for accounting for unusual system or software
issues.
But why should you use Bugzilla?
Bugzilla is very adaptable to various situations. Known uses currently
include IT support queues, Systems Administration deployment
management, chip design and development problem tracking (both
pre-and-post fabrication), and software and hardware bug tracking for
luminaries such as Redhat, NASA, Linux-Mandrake, and VA Systems.
Combined with systems such as CVS, Bonsai, or Perforce SCM, Bugzilla
provides a powerful, easy-to-use solution to configuration management
and replication problems.
Bugzilla can dramatically increase the productivity and accountability
of individual employees by providing a documented workflow and
positive feedback for good performance. How many times do you wake up
in the morning, remembering that you were supposed to do something
today, but you just can't quite remember? Put it in Bugzilla, and you
have a record of it from which you can extrapolate milestones, predict
product versions for integration, and follow the discussion trail that
led to critical decisions.
Ultimately, Bugzilla puts the power in your hands to improve your
value to your employer or business while providing a usable framework
for your natural attention to detail and knowledge store to flourish.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 3. Using Bugzilla
3.1. How do I use Bugzilla?
This section contains information for end-users of Bugzilla. There is
a Bugzilla test installation, called Landfill, which you are welcome
to play with (if it's up.) However, it does not necessarily have all
Bugzilla features enabled, and often runs cutting-edge versions of
Bugzilla for testing, so some things may work slightly differently
than mentioned here.
_________________________________________________________________
3.1.1. Create a Bugzilla Account
If you want to use Bugzilla, first you need to create an account.
Consult with the administrator responsible for your installation of
Bugzilla for the URL you should use to access it. If you're
test-driving Bugzilla, use this URL:
http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/
1. Click the "Open a new Bugzilla account" link, enter your email
address and, optionally, your name in the spaces provided, then
click "Create Account" .
2. Within moments, you should receive an email to the address you
provided above, which contains your login name (generally the same
as the email address), and a password you can use to access your
account. This password is randomly generated, and can be changed
to something more memorable.
3. Click the "Log In" link in the yellow area at the bottom of the
page in your browser, enter your email address and password into
the spaces provided, and click "Login".
You are now logged in. Bugzilla uses cookies for authentication so,
unless your IP address changes, you should not have to log in again.
_________________________________________________________________
3.1.2. Anatomy of a Bug
The core of Bugzilla is the screen which displays a particular bug.
It's a good place to explain some Bugzilla concepts. Bug 1 on Landfill
is a good example. Note that the labels for most fields are
hyperlinks; clicking them will take you to context-sensitive help on
that particular field. Fields marked * may not be present on every
installation of Bugzilla.
1. Product and Component: Bugs are divided up by Product and
Component, with a Product having one or more Components in it. For
example, bugzilla.mozilla.org's "Bugzilla" Product is composed of
several Components:
Administration: Administration of a Bugzilla installation.
Bugzilla-General: Anything that doesn't fit in the other components,
or spans multiple components.
Creating/Changing Bugs: Creating, changing, and viewing bugs.
Documentation: The Bugzilla documentation, including The Bugzilla
Guide.
Email: Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla.
Installation: The installation process of Bugzilla.
Query/Buglist: Anything to do with searching for bugs and viewing the
buglists.
Reporting/Charting: Getting reports from Bugzilla.
User Accounts: Anything about managing a user account from the user's
perspective. Saved queries, creating accounts, changing passwords,
logging in, etc.
User Interface: General issues having to do with the user interface
cosmetics (not functionality) including cosmetic issues, HTML
templates, etc.
2. Status and Resolution: These define exactly what state the bug is
in - from not even being confirmed as a bug, through to being
fixed and the fix confirmed by Quality Assurance. The different
possible values for Status and Resolution on your installation
should be documented in the context-sensitive help for those
items.
3. Assigned To: The person responsible for fixing the bug.
4. *URL: A URL associated with the bug, if any.
5. Summary: A one-sentence summary of the problem.
6. *Status Whiteboard: (a.k.a. Whiteboard) A free-form text area for
adding short notes and tags to a bug.
7. *Keywords: The administrator can define keywords which you can use
to tag and categorise bugs - e.g. The Mozilla Project has keywords
like crash and regression.
8. Platform and OS: These indicate the computing environment where
the bug was found.
9. Version: The "Version" field is usually used for versions of a
product which have been released, and is set to indicate which
versions of a Component have the particular problem the bug report
is about.
10. Priority: The bug assignee uses this field to prioritise his or
her bugs. It's a good idea not to change this on other people's
bugs.
11. Severity: This indicates how severe the problem is - from blocker
("application unusable") to trivial ("minor cosmetic issue"). You
can also use this field to indicate whether a bug is an
enhancement request.
12. *Target: (a.k.a. Target Milestone) A future version by which the
bug is to be fixed. e.g. The Bugzilla Project's milestones for
future Bugzilla versions are 2.18, 2.20, 3.0, etc. Milestones are
not restricted to numbers, thought - you can use any text strings,
such as dates.
13. Reporter: The person who filed the bug.
14. CC list: A list of people who get mail when the bug changes.
15. Attachments: You can attach files (e.g. testcases or patches) to
bugs. If there are any attachments, they are listed in this
section.
16. *Dependencies: If this bug cannot be fixed unless other bugs are
fixed (depends on), or this bug stops other bugs being fixed
(blocks), their numbers are recorded here.
17. *Votes: Whether this bug has any votes.
18. Additional Comments: You can add your two cents to the bug
discussion here, if you have something worthwhile to say.
_________________________________________________________________
3.1.3. Searching for Bugs
The Bugzilla Search page is is the interface where you can find any
bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system. You
can play with it here: landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/query.cgi .
The Search page has controls for selecting different possible values
for all of the fields in a bug, as described above. Once you've
defined a search, you can either run it, or save it as a Remembered
Query, which can optionally appear in the footer of your pages.
Highly advanced querying is done using Boolean Charts, which have
their own context-sensitive help .
_________________________________________________________________
3.1.4. Bug Lists
If you run a search, a list of matching bugs will be returned. The
default search is to return all open bugs on the system - don't try
running this search on a Bugzilla installation with a lot of bugs!
The format of the list is configurable. For example, it can be sorted
by clicking the column headings. Other useful features can be accessed
using the links at the bottom of the list:
Long Format: this gives you a large page with a non-editable summary
of the fields of each bug.
Change Columns: change the bug attributes which appear in the list.
Change several bugs at once: If your account is sufficiently
empowered, you can make the same change to all the bugs in the list -
for example, changing their owner.
Send mail to bug owners: Sends mail to the owners of all bugs on the
list.
Edit this query: If you didn't get exactly the results you were
looking for, you can return to the Query page through this link and
make small revisions to the query you just made so you get more
accurate results.
_________________________________________________________________
3.1.5. Filing Bugs
Years of bug writing experience has been distilled for your reading
pleasure into the Bug Writing Guidelines. While some of the advice is
Mozilla-specific, the basic principles of reporting Reproducible,
Specific bugs, isolating the Product you are using, the Version of the
Product, the Component which failed, the Hardware Platform, and
Operating System you were using at the time of the failure go a long
way toward ensuring accurate, responsible fixes for the bug that bit
you.
The procedure for filing a test bug is as follows:
1. Go to Landfill in your browser and click Enter a new bug report.
2. Select a product - any one will do.
3. Fill in the fields. Bugzilla should have made reasonable guesses,
based upon your browser, for the "Platform" and "OS" drop-down
boxes. If they are wrong, change them.
4. Select "Commit" and send in your bug report.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2. Hints and Tips
This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices that have
been developed.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.1. Autolinkification
Bugzilla comments are plain text - so posting HTML will result in
literal HTML tags rather than being interpreted by a browser. However,
Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain sorts of
text in comments. For example, the text http://www.bugzilla.org will
be turned into http://www.bugzilla.org. Other strings which get
linkified in the obvious manner are:
bug 12345
bug 23456, comment 53
attachment 4321
mailto:george@example.com
george@example.com
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org
Most other sorts of URL
A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment, you
should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets autolinkified for the
convenience of others.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.2. Quicksearch
Quicksearch is a single-text-box query tool which uses metacharacters
to indicate what is to be searched. For example, typing "foo|bar" into
Quicksearch would search for "foo" or "bar" in the summary and status
whiteboard of a bug; adding ":BazProduct" would search only in that
product.
You'll find the Quicksearch box on Bugzilla's front page, along with a
Help link which details how to use it.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.3. Comments
If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if either you
have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla requires it. Otherwise,
you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail. To take an example: a
user can set up their account to filter out messages where someone
just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug (which happens a lot.)
If you come along, add yourself to the CC field, and add a comment
saying "Adding self to CC", then that person gets a pointless piece of
mail they would otherwise have avoided.
Don't use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable,
particularly if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style four
line ASCII art creations are not.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.4. Attachments
Use attachments, rather than comments, for large chunks of ASCII data,
such as trace, debugging output files, or log files. That way, it
doesn't bloat the bug for everyone who wants to read it, and cause
people to receive fat, useless mails.
Trim screenshots. There's no need to show the whole screen if you are
pointing out a single-pixel problem.
Don't attach simple test cases (e.g. one HTML file, one CSS file and
an image) as a ZIP file. Instead, upload them in reverse order and
edit the referring file so that they point to the attached files. This
way, the test case works immediately out of the bug.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.5. Filing Bugs
Try to make sure that everything said in the summary is also said in
the first comment. Summaries are often updated and this will ensure
your original information is easily accessible.
You do not need to put "any" or similar strings in the URL field. If
there is no specific URL associated with the bug, leave this field
blank.
If you feel a bug you filed was incorrectly marked as a DUPLICATE of
another, please question it in your bug, not the bug it was duped to.
Feel free to CC the person who duped it if they are not already CCed.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3. User Preferences
Once you have logged in, you can customise various aspects of Bugzilla
via the "Edit prefs" link in the page footer. The preferences are
split into four tabs:
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.1. Account Settings
On this tab, you can change your basic account information, including
your password, email address and real name. For security reasons, in
order to change anything on this page you must type your current
password into the "Password" field at the top of the page. If you
attempt to change your email address, a confirmation email is sent to
both the old and new addresses, with a link to use to confirm the
change. This helps to prevent account hijacking.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.2. Email Settings
On this tab you can reduce or increase the amount of email sent you
from Bugzilla, opting in our out depending on your relationship to the
bug and the change that was made to it. (Note that you can also do
client-side filtering using the X-Bugzilla-Reason header which
Bugzilla adds to all bugmail.)
By entering user email names, delineated by commas, into the "Users to
watch" text entry box you can receive a copy of all the bugmail of
other users (security settings permitting.) This powerful
functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change
projects or users go on holiday.
Note
The ability to watch other users may not be available in all Bugzilla
installations. If you can't see it, ask your administrator.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.3. Page Footer
On the Search page, you can store queries in Bugzilla, so if you
regularly run a particular query it is just a drop-down menu away.
Once you have a stored query, you can come here to request that it
also be displayed in your page footer.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.4. Permissions
This is a purely informative page which outlines your current
permissions on this installation of Bugzilla - what product groups you
are in, and whether you can edit bugs or perform various
administration functions.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 4. Installation
4.1. Step-by-step Install
4.1.1. Introduction
Bugzilla has been successfully installed under Solaris, Linux, and
Win32. Win32 is not yet officially supported, but many people have got
it working fine. Please see Section 4.3.1 for further advice on
getting Bugzilla to work on Microsoft Windows.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.2. Package List
Note
If you are running the very most recent version of Perl and MySQL
(both the executables and development libraries) on your system, you
can skip these manual installation steps for the Perl modules by using
Bundle::Bugzilla; see Using Bundle::Bugzilla instead of manually
installing Perl modules.
The software packages necessary for the proper running of Bugzilla
(with download links) are:
1. MySQL database server (3.23.41 or greater)
2. Perl (5.6, 5.6.1 is recommended if you wish to use
Bundle::Bugzilla)
3. Perl Modules (minimum version):
a. Template (v2.08)
b. File::Temp (1.804) (Prerequisite for Template)
c. AppConfig (1.52)
d. Text::Wrap (2001.0131)
e. File::Spec (0.82)
f. Data::Dumper (any)
g. DBD::mysql (2.1010)
h. DBI (1.32)
i. Date::Parse (any)
j. CGI (2.88)
and, optionally:
a. GD (1.20) for bug charting
b. GD::Graph (any) for bug charting
c. GD::Text::Align (any) for bug charting
d. Chart::Base (0.99c) for bug charting
e. XML::Parser (any) for the XML interface
f. MIME::Parser (any) for the email interface
4. The web server of your choice. Apache is highly recommended.
Warning
It is a good idea, while installing Bugzilla, to ensure that there is
some kind of firewall between you and the rest of the Internet,
because your machine may be insecure for periods during the install.
Many installation steps require an active Internet connection to
complete, but you must take care to ensure that at no point is your
machine vulnerable to an attack.
Note
Linux-Mandrake 8.0 includes every required and optional library for
Bugzilla. The easiest way to install them is by using the urpmi
utility. If you follow these commands, you should have everything you
need for Bugzilla, and checksetup.pl should not complain about any
missing libraries. You may already have some of these installed.
bash# urpmi perl-mysql
bash# urpmi perl-chart
bash# urpmi perl-gd
bash# urpmi perl-MailTools (for Bugzilla email integration)
bash# urpmi apache-modules
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.3. MySQL
Visit the MySQL homepage at www.mysql.com to grab and install the
latest stable release of the server.
Note
Many of the binary versions of MySQL store their data files in /var.
On some Unix systems, this is part of a smaller root partition, and
may not have room for your bug database. You can set the data
directory as an option to configure if you build MySQL from source
yourself.
If you install from something other than an RPM or Debian package, you
will need to add mysqld to your init scripts so the server daemon will
come back up whenever your machine reboots. Further discussion of UNIX
init sequences are beyond the scope of this guide.
Change your init script to start mysqld with the ability to accept
large packets. By default, mysqld only accepts packets up to 64K long.
This limits the size of attachments you may put on bugs. If you add -O
max_allowed_packet=1M to the command that starts mysqld (or
safe_mysqld), then you will be able to have attachments up to about 1
megabyte. There is a Bugzilla parameter for maximum attachment size;
you should configure it to match the value you choose here.
If you plan on running Bugzilla and MySQL on the same machine,
consider using the --skip-networking option in the init script. This
enhances security by preventing network access to MySQL.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.4. Perl
Any machine that doesn't have Perl on it is a sad machine indeed. Perl
can be got in source form from perl.com for the rare *nix systems
which don't have it. Although Bugzilla runs with perl 5.6, it's a good
idea to be up to the very latest version if you can when running
Bugzilla. As of this writing, that is Perl version 5.8.
Tip
You can skip the following Perl module installation steps by
installing Bundle::Bugzilla from CPAN, which installs all required
modules for you.
bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Bundle::Bugzilla"'
Bundle::Bugzilla doesn't include GD, Chart::Base, or MIME::Parser,
which are not essential to a basic Bugzilla install. If installing
this bundle fails, you should install each module individually to
isolate the problem.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5. Perl Modules
All Perl modules can be found on the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network (CPAN). The CPAN servers have a real tendency to bog down, so
please use mirrors.
Quality, general Perl module installation instructions can be found on
the CPAN website, but the easy thing to do is to just use the CPAN
shell which does all the hard work for you. To use the CPAN shell to
install a module:
bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install ""'
To do it the hard way:
Untar the module tarball -- it should create its own directory
CD to the directory just created, and enter the following commands:
1. bash# perl Makefile.PL
2. bash# make
3. bash# make test
4. bash# make install
Warning
Many people complain that Perl modules will not install for them. Most
times, the error messages complain that they are missing a file in
"@INC". Virtually every time, this error is due to permissions being
set too restrictively for you to compile Perl modules or not having
the necessary Perl development libraries installed on your system.
Consult your local UNIX systems administrator for help solving these
permissions issues; if you are the local UNIX sysadmin, please consult
the newsgroup/mailing list for further assistance or hire someone to
help you out.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.1. DBI
The DBI module is a generic Perl module used the MySQL-related
modules. As long as your Perl installation was done correctly the DBI
module should be a breeze. It's a mixed Perl/C module, but Perl's
MakeMaker system simplifies the C compilation greatly.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.2. Data::Dumper
The Data::Dumper module provides data structure persistence for Perl
(similar to Java's serialization). It comes with later sub-releases of
Perl 5.004, but a re-installation just to be sure it's available won't
hurt anything.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.3. MySQL-related modules
The Perl/MySQL interface requires a few mutually-dependent Perl
modules. These modules are grouped together into the the
Msql-Mysql-modules package.
The MakeMaker process will ask you a few questions about the desired
compilation target and your MySQL installation. For most of the
questions the provided default will be adequate, but when asked if
your desired target is the MySQL or mSQL packages, you should select
the MySQL related ones. Later you will be asked if you wish to provide
backwards compatibility with the older MySQL packages; you should
answer YES to this question. The default is NO.
A host of 'localhost' should be fine and a testing user of 'test' with
a null password should find itself with sufficient access to run tests
on the 'test' database which MySQL created upon installation.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.4. TimeDate modules
Many of the more common date/time/calendar related Perl modules have
been grouped into a bundle similar to the MySQL modules bundle. This
bundle is stored on the CPAN under the name TimeDate. The component
module we're most interested in is the Date::Format module, but
installing all of them is probably a good idea anyway.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.5. GD (optional)
The GD library was written by Thomas Boutell a long while ago to
programatically generate images in C. Since then it's become the
defacto standard for programmatic image construction. The Perl
bindings to it found in the GD library are used on millions of web
pages to generate graphs on the fly. That's what Bugzilla will be
using it for so you must install it if you want any of the graphing to
work.
Note
The Perl GD library requires some other libraries that may or may not
be installed on your system, including libpng and libgd. The full
requirements are listed in the Perl GD library README. If compiling GD
fails, it's probably because you're missing a required library.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.6. Chart::Base (optional)
The Chart module provides Bugzilla with on-the-fly charting abilities.
It can be installed in the usual fashion after it has been fetched
from CPAN. Note that earlier versions that 0.99c used GIFs, which are
no longer supported by the latest versions of GD.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.5.7. Template Toolkit
When you install Template Toolkit, you'll get asked various questions
about features to enable. The defaults are fine, except that it is
recommended you use the high speed XS Stash of the Template Toolkit,
in order to achieve best performance.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.6. HTTP Server
You have freedom of choice here, pretty much any web server that is
capable of running CGI scripts will work. Section 4.4 has more
information about configuring web servers to work with Bugzilla.
Note
We strongly recommend Apache as the web server to use. The Bugzilla
Guide installation instructions, in general, assume you are using
Apache. If you have got Bugzilla working using another webserver,
please share your experiences with us.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.7. Bugzilla
You should untar the Bugzilla files into a directory that you're
willing to make writable by the default web server user (probably
"nobody"). You may decide to put the files in the main web space for
your web server or perhaps in /usr/local with a symbolic link in the
web space that points to the Bugzilla directory.
Tip
If you symlink the bugzilla directory into your Apache's HTML
hierarchy, you may receive Forbidden errors unless you add the
"FollowSymLinks" directive to the entry for the HTML root
in httpd.conf.
Once all the files are in a web accessible directory, make that
directory writable by your webserver's user. This is a temporary step
until you run the post-install checksetup.pl script, which locks down
your installation.
Lastly, you'll need to set up a symbolic link to
/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl for the correct location of your Perl
executable (probably /usr/bin/perl). Otherwise you must hack all the
.cgi files to change where they look for Perl. This can be done using
the following Perl one-liner, but I suggest using the symlink approach
to avoid upgrade hassles.
Note
"Bonsaitools" is the name Terry Weissman, the original author of
Bugzilla, created for his suite of webtools at the time he created
Bugzilla and several other tools in use at mozilla.org. He created a
directory, /usr/bonsaitools to house his specific versions of perl and
other utilities. This usage is still current at bugzilla.mozilla.org,
but in general most other places do not use it. You can either edit
the paths at the start of each perl file to the correct location of
perl on your system, or simply bow to history and create a
/usr/bonsaitools and /usr/bonsaitools/bin directory, placing a symlink
to perl on your system inside /usr/bonsaitools/bin
perl -pi -e 's@#\!/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl@#\!/usr/bin/perl@' *cgi *pl Bug.pm
processmail syncshadowdb
Change /usr/bin/perl to match the location of Perl on your machine.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.8. Setting Up the MySQL Database
After you've gotten all the software installed and working you're
ready to start preparing the database for its life as the back end to
a high quality bug tracker.
First, you'll want to fix MySQL permissions to allow access from
Bugzilla. For the purpose of this Installation section, the Bugzilla
username will be "bugs", and will have minimal permissions.
Begin by giving the MySQL root user a password. MySQL passwords are
limited to 16 characters.
bash# mysql -u root mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD(') WHERE
user='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
From this point on, if you need to access MySQL as the MySQL root
user, you will need to use mysql -u root -p and enter .
Remember that MySQL user names have nothing to do with Unix user names
(login names).
Next, we use an SQL GRANT command to create a "bugs" user, and grant
sufficient permissions for checksetup.pl, which we'll use later, to
work its magic. This also restricts the "bugs" user to operations
within a database called "bugs", and only allows the account to
connect from "localhost". Modify it to reflect your setup if you will
be connecting from another machine or as a different user.
Remember to set to some unique password.
mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,INDEX,
ALTER,CREATE,DROP,REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY
'';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.9. checksetup.pl
Next, run the magic checksetup.pl script. (Many thanks to Holger
Schurig for writing this script!) This script is designed to make sure
your MySQL database and other configuration options are consistent
with the Bugzilla CGI files. It will make sure Bugzilla files and
directories have reasonable permissions, set up the data directory,
and create all the MySQL tables.
bash# ./checksetup.pl
The first time you run it, it will create a file called localconfig.
This file contains a variety of settings you may need to tweak
including how Bugzilla should connect to the MySQL database.
The connection settings include:
1. server's host: just use "localhost" if the MySQL server is local
2. database name: "bugs" if you're following these directions
3. MySQL username: "bugs" if you're following these directions
4. Password for the "bugs" MySQL account; () above
Once you are happy with the settings, su to the user your web server
runs as, and re-run checksetup.pl. (Note: on some security-conscious
systems, you may need to change the login shell for the webserver
account before you can do this.) On this second run, it will create
the database and an administrator account for which you will be
prompted to provide information.
Note
The checksetup.pl script is designed so that you can run it at any
time without causing harm. You should run it after any upgrade to
Bugzilla.
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.10. Securing MySQL
If you followed the installation instructions for setting up your
"bugs" and "root" user in MySQL, much of this should not apply to you.
If you are upgrading an existing installation of Bugzilla, you should
pay close attention to this section.
Most MySQL installs have "interesting" default security parameters:
mysqld defaults to running as root
it defaults to allowing external network connections
it has a known port number, and is easy to detect
it defaults to no passwords whatsoever
it defaults to allowing "File_Priv"
This means anyone from anywhere on the Internet can not only drop the
database with one SQL command, and they can write as root to the
system.
To see your permissions do:
bash# mysql -u root -p
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> select * from user;
mysql> select * from db;
To fix the gaping holes:
DELETE FROM user WHERE User='';
UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('new_password') WHERE user='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
If you're not running "mit-pthreads" you can use:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO bugs@localhost;
GRANT ALL ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost;
REVOKE DROP ON bugs.* FROM bugs@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
With "mit-pthreads" you'll need to modify the "globals.pl"
Mysql->Connect line to specify a specific host name instead of
"localhost", and accept external connections:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO bugs@bounce.hop.com;
GRANT ALL ON bugs.* TO bugs@bounce.hop.com;
REVOKE DROP ON bugs.* FROM bugs@bounce.hop.com;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Consider also:
1. Turning off external networking with "--skip-networking", unless
you have "mit-pthreads", in which case you can't. Without
networking, MySQL connects with a Unix domain socket.
2. using the --user= option to mysqld to run it as an unprivileged
user.
3. running MySQL in a chroot jail
4. running the httpd in a chroot jail
5. making sure the MySQL passwords are different from the OS
passwords (MySQL "root" has nothing to do with system "root").
6. running MySQL on a separate untrusted machine
7. making backups ;-)
_________________________________________________________________
4.1.11. Configuring Bugzilla
You should run through the parameters on the Edit Parameters page
(link in the footer) and set them all to appropriate values. They key
parameters are documented in Section 5.1.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2. Optional Additional Configuration
4.2.1. Dependency Charts
As well as the text-based dependency graphs, Bugzilla also supports
dependency graphing, using a package called 'dot'. Exactly how this
works is controlled by the 'webdotbase' parameter, which can have one
of three values:
1. A complete file path to the command 'dot' (part of GraphViz) will
generate the graphs locally
2. A URL prefix pointing to an installation of the webdot package
will generate the graphs remotely
3. A blank value will disable dependency graphing.
So, to get this working, install GraphViz. If you do that, you need to
enable server-side image maps in Apache. Alternatively, you could set
up a webdot server, or use the AT&T public webdot server (the default
for the webdotbase param). Note that AT&T's server won't work if
Bugzilla is only accessible using HARTS.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.2. Bug Graphs
As long as you installed the GD and Graph::Base Perl modules you might
as well turn on the nifty Bugzilla bug reporting graphs.
Add a cron entry like this to run collectstats.pl daily at 5 after
midnight:
bash# crontab -e
5 0 * * * cd ; ./collectstats.pl
After two days have passed you'll be able to view bug graphs from the
Bug Reports page.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.3. The Whining Cron
By now you have a fully functional Bugzilla, but what good are bugs if
they're not annoying? To help make those bugs more annoying you can
set up Bugzilla's automatic whining system to complain at engineers
which leave their bugs in the NEW state without triaging them.
This can be done by adding the following command as a daily crontab
entry (for help on that see that crontab man page):
cd ; ./whineatnews.pl
Tip
Depending on your system, crontab may have several manpages. The
following command should lead you to the most useful page for this
purpose:
man 5 crontab
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.4. LDAP Authentication
Warning
This information on using the LDAP authentication options with
Bugzilla is old, and the authors do not know of anyone who has tested
it. Approach with caution.
The existing authentication scheme for Bugzilla uses email addresses
as the primary user ID, and a password to authenticate that user. All
places within Bugzilla where you need to deal with user ID (e.g
assigning a bug) use the email address. The LDAP authentication builds
on top of this scheme, rather than replacing it. The initial log in is
done with a username and password for the LDAP directory. This then
fetches the email address from LDAP and authenticates seamlessly in
the standard Bugzilla authentication scheme using this email address.
If an account for this address already exists in your Bugzilla system,
it will log in to that account. If no account for that email address
exists, one is created at the time of login. (In this case, Bugzilla
will attempt to use the "displayName" or "cn" attribute to determine
the user's full name.) After authentication, all other user-related
tasks are still handled by email address, not LDAP username. You still
assign bugs by email address, query on users by email address, etc.
Using LDAP for Bugzilla authentication requires the Mozilla::LDAP (aka
PerLDAP) Perl module. The Mozilla::LDAP module in turn requires
Netscape's Directory SDK for C. After you have installed the SDK, then
install the PerLDAP module. Mozilla::LDAP and the Directory SDK for C
are both available for download from mozilla.org.
Set the Param 'useLDAP' to "On" **only** if you will be using an LDAP
directory for authentication. Be very careful when setting up this
parameter; if you set LDAP authentication, but do not have a valid
LDAP directory set up, you will not be able to log back in to Bugzilla
once you log out. (If this happens, you can get back in by manually
editing the data/params file, and setting useLDAP back to 0.)
If using LDAP, you must set the three additional parameters: Set
LDAPserver to the name (and optionally port) of your LDAP server. If
no port is specified, it defaults to the default port of 389. (e.g
"ldap.mycompany.com" or "ldap.mycompany.com:1234") Set LDAPBaseDN to
the base DN for searching for users in your LDAP directory. (e.g.
"ou=People,o=MyCompany") uids must be unique under the DN specified
here. Set LDAPmailattribute to the name of the attribute in your LDAP
directory which contains the primary email address. On most directory
servers available, this is "mail", but you may need to change this.
You can also try using OpenLDAP with Bugzilla, using any of a number
of administration tools. You should apply the patch attached this bug:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158630, then set the
following object classes for your users:
1. objectClass: person
2. objectClass: organizationalPerson
3. objectClass: inetOrgPerson
4. objectClass: top
5. objectClass: posixAccount
6. objectClass: shadowAccount
Please note that this patch has not yet been accepted by the Bugzilla
team, and so you may need to do some manual tweaking. That said, it
looks like Net::LDAP is probably the way to go in the future.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.5. Preventing untrusted Bugzilla content from executing malicious
Javascript code
It is possible for a Bugzilla to execute malicious Javascript code.
Due to internationalization concerns, we are unable to incorporate the
code changes necessary to fulfill the CERT advisory requirements
mentioned in
http://www.cet.org/tech_tips/malicious_code_mitigation.html/#3.
Executing the following code snippet from a UNIX command shell will
rectify the problem if your Bugzilla installation is intended for an
English-speaking audience. As always, be sure your Bugzilla
installation has a good backup before making changes, and I recommend
you understand what the script is doing before executing it.
bash# perl -pi -e "s/Content-Type\: text\/html/Content-Type\: text\/html\; char
set=ISO-8859-1/i" *.cgi *.pl
All this one-liner command does is search for all instances of
"Content-type: text/html" and replaces it with "Content-Type:
text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" . This specification prevents possible
Javascript attacks on the browser, and is suggested for all
English-speaking sites. For non-English-speaking Bugzilla sites, I
suggest changing "ISO-8859-1", above, to "UTF-8".
Note
Using tags to set the charset is not recommended, as there's a
bug in Netscape 4.x which causes pages marked up in this way to load
twice. See bug 126266 for more information including progress toward
making bugzilla charset aware by default.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.6. .htaccess files and security
To enhance the security of your Bugzilla installation, Bugzilla's
checksetup.pl script will generate .htaccess files which the Apache
webserver can use to restrict access to the bugzilla data files. These
.htaccess files will not work with Apache 1.2.x - but this has
security holes, so you shouldn't be using it anyway.
Note
If you are using an alternate provider of webdot services for graphing
(as described when viewing editparams.cgi in your web browser), you
will need to change the ip address in data/webdot/.htaccess to the ip
address of the webdot server that you are using.
The default .htaccess file may not provide adequate access
restrictions, depending on your web server configuration. Be sure to
check the entries for your Bugzilla directory so that the
.htaccess file is allowed to override web server defaults. For
instance, let's assume your installation of Bugzilla is installed to
/usr/local/bugzilla . You should have this entry in your
httpd.conf file:
Options +FollowSymLinks +Indexes +Includes +ExecCGI
AllowOverride All
The important part above is "AllowOverride All" . Without that, the
.htaccess file created by checksetup.pl will not have sufficient
permissions to protect your Bugzilla installation.
If you are using Internet Information Server (IIS) or another web
server which does not observe .htaccess conventions, you can disable
their creation by editing localconfig and setting the $create_htaccess
variable to 0.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.7. directoryindex for the Bugzilla default page.
You should modify the parameter for the Apache
virtual host running your Bugzilla installation to allow index.cgi as
the index page for a directory, as well as the usual index.html,
index.htm, and so forth.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.8. Bugzilla and mod_perl
Bugzilla is unsupported under mod_perl. Effort is underway to make it
work cleanly in a mod_perl environment, but it is slow going.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2.9. mod_throttle and Security
It is possible for a user, by mistake or on purpose, to access the
database many times in a row which can result in very slow access
speeds for other users. If your Bugzilla installation is experiencing
this problem , you may install the Apache module mod_throttle which
can limit connections by ip-address. You may download this module at
http://www.snert.com/Software/Throttle/. Follow the instructions to
install into your Apache install. This module only functions with the
Apache web server! You may use the ThrottleClientIP command provided
by this module to accomplish this goal. See the Module Instructions
for more information.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3. OS Specific Installation Notes
Many aspects of the Bugzilla installation can be affected by the the
operating system you choose to install it on. Sometimes it can be made
easier and others more difficult. This section will attempt to help
you understand both the difficulties of running on specific operating
systems and the utilities available to make it easier.
If you have anything to add or notes for an operating system not
covered, please file a bug in Bugzilla Documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1. Microsoft Windows
Making Bugzilla work on windows is still a very painful processes. The
Bugzilla Team is working to make it easier, but that goal is not
considered a top priority. If you wish to run Bugzilla, we still
recommend doing so on a Unix based system such as GNU/Linux. As of
this writing, all members of the Bugzilla team and all known large
installations run on Unix based systems.
If after hearing all that, you have enough pain tolerance to attempt
installing Bugzilla on Win32, here are some pointers. Because this is
a development version of the guide, these instructions are subject to
change without notice. In fact, the Bugzilla Team hopes they do as we
would like to have Bugzilla resonabally close to "out of the box"
compatibility by the 2.18 release.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.1. Win32 Perl
Perl for Windows can be obtained from ActiveState. You should be able
to find a compiled binary at
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.2. Perl Modules on Win32
Bugzilla on Windows requires the same perl modules found in Section
4.1.2. The main difference is that windows uses ppm instead of CPAN.
C:\perl> ppm
Note
The above syntax should work for all modules with the exception of
Template Toolkit. The Template Toolkit website suggests using the
instructions on OpenInteract's website.
Note
A complete list of modules that can be installed using ppm can be
found at http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/5.6plus.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.3. Code changes required to run on win32
Unfortunately, Bugzilla still doesn't run "out of the box" on Windows.
There is work in progress to make this easier, but until that happens
code will have to be modified. This section is an attempt to list the
required changes. It is an attempt to be all inclusive, but there may
be other changes required. If you find something is missing, please
file a bug in Bugzilla Documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.3.1. Changes to checksetup.pl
In checksetup.pl, the line reading:
my $mysql_binaries = `which mysql`;
to
my $mysql_binaries = "D:\\mysql\\bin\\mysql";
And you'll also need to change:
my $webservergid = getgrnam($my_webservergroup)
to
my $webservergid = '8'
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.3.2. Making mail work
The easiest way to get mail working is to use the mail patches on bug
124174. With any luck, this patch will receive the required reviews
and integrated into the main Bugzilla distribution very soon. Until
that happens, there's at least one report of this patch working well
on Windows.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.3.3. System Calls
In order to get system calls to work on win32's perl, you need to tell
the windows shell what interpreter to use. This is done by changing
the system calls. You will need to search all of Bugzilla's code for
system calls. To tell perl your interpreter, it needs to be the first
argument to the system call. For example, you'll need to change:
system("./processmail", $id, $exporter);
with
system("C:\\perl\\bin\\perl", "processmail", $id, $exporter);
Notice that the ./ is also removed.
Tip
The grep command is very helpful in finding these system calls,
assuming you have the cygwin utilities.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1.4. Serving the web pages
As is the case on Unix based systems, any web server should be able to
handle Bugzilla; however, the Bugzilla Team still recommends Apache
whenever asked. No matter what web server you choose, be sure to pay
attention to the security notes in Section 5.6. More information on
configuring specific web servers can be found in Section 4.4.
Note
If using Apache on windows, you can set the ScriptInterpreterSource
directive in your Apache config, if you don't do this, you'll have to
modify the first line of every script to contain your path to perl
instead of /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.2. Mac OS X
There are a lot of common libraries and utilities out there that Apple
did not include with Mac OS X, but which run perfectly well on it. The
GD library, which Bugzilla needs to do bug graphs, is one of these.
The easiest way to get a lot of these is with a program called Fink,
which is similar in nature to the CPAN installer, but installs common
GNU utilities. Fink is available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fink/.
Follow the instructions for setting up Fink. Once it's installed,
you'll want to run the following as root: fink install gd
It will prompt you for a number of dependencies, type 'y' and hit
enter to install all of the dependencies. Then watch it work.
To prevent creating conflicts with the software that Apple installs by
default, Fink creates its own directory tree at /sw where it installs
most of the software that it installs. This means your libraries and
headers for libgd will be at /sw/lib and /sw/include instead of
/usr/lib and /usr/local/include. Because of these changed locations
for the libraries, the Perl GD module will not install directly via
CPAN, because it looks for the specific paths instead of getting them
from your environment. But there's a way around that :-)
Instead of typing "install GD" at the cpan> prompt, type look GD. This
should go through the motions of downloading the latest version of the
GD module, then it will open a shell and drop you into the build
directory. Apply this patch to the Makefile.PL file (save the patch
into a file and use the command patch < patchfile.)
Then, run these commands to finish the installation of the GD module:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
And don't forget to run exit to get back to CPAN.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4. HTTP Server Configuration
The Bugzilla Team recommends Apache when using Bugzilla, however, any
web server that can be configured to run CGI scripts should be able to
handle Bugzilla. No matter what web server you choose, but especially
if you choose something other than Apache, you should be sure to read
Section 5.6.
The plan for this section is to eventually document the specifics of
how to lock down permissions on individual web servers.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.1. Apache httpd
As mentioned above, the Bugzilla Team recommends Apache for use with
Bugzilla. You will have to make sure that Apache is properly
configured to run the Bugzilla CGI scripts. You also need to make sure
that the .htaccess files created by ./checksetup.pl (shown in Example
4-1 for the curious) are allowed to override Apache's normal access
permissions or else important password information may be exposed to
the Internet.
Many Apache installations are not configured to run scripts anywhere
but in the cgi-bin directory; however, we recommend that Bugzilla not
be installed in the cgi-bin, otherwise the static files such as images
and JavaScript will not work correctly. To allow scripts to run in the
normal web space, the following changes should be made to your
httpd.conf file.
To allow files with a .cgi extension to be run, make sure the
following line exists and is uncommented:
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
To allow .htaccess files to override permissions and .cgi files to run
in the Bugzilla directory, make sure the following two lines are in a
Directory directive that applies to the Bugzilla directory on your
system (either the Bugzilla directory or one of its parents).
Options +ExecCGI
AllowOverride Limit
Note
For more information on Apache and its directives, see the glossary
entry on Apache.
Example 4-1. .htaccess files for Apache
$BUGZILLA_HOME/.htaccess
# don't allow people to retrieve non-cgi executable files or our private data
deny from all
allow from all
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/.htaccess
# nothing in this directory is retrievable unless overriden by an .htaccess
# in a subdirectory; the only exception is duplicates.rdf, which is used by
# duplicates.xul and must be loadable over the web
deny from all
allow from all
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/webdot
# Restrict access to .dot files to the public webdot server at research.att.com
# if research.att.com ever changed their IP, or if you use a different
# webdot server, you'll need to edit this
Allow from 192.20.225.10
Deny from all
# Allow access by a local copy of 'dot' to .png, .gif, .jpg, and
# .map files
Allow from all
# And no directory listings, either.
Deny from all
$BUGZILLA_HOME/Bugzilla/.htaccess
# nothing in this directory is retrievable unless overriden by an .htaccess
# in a subdirectory
deny from all
$BUGZILLA_HOME/template/.htaccess
# nothing in this directory is retrievable unless overriden by an .htaccess
# in a subdirectory
deny from all
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.2. Microsoft Internet Information Services
If you need, or for some reason even want, to use Microsoft's Internet
Information Services or Personal Web Server you should be able to. You
will need to configure them to know how to run CGI scripts, however.
This is described in Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q245225 for
Internet Information Services and Q231998 for Personal Web Server.
Also, and this can't be stressed enough, make sure that files such as
localconfig and your data directory are secured as described in
Section 5.6.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.3. AOL Server
Ben FrantzDale reported success using AOL Server with Bugzilla. He
reported his experience and what appears below is based on that.
AOL Server will have to be configured to run CGI scripts, please
consult the documentation that came with your server for more
information on how to do this.
Because AOL Server doesn't support .htaccess files, you'll have to
create a TCL script. You should create an
aolserver/modules/tcl/filter.tcl file (the filename shouldn't matter)
with the following contents (change /bugzilla/ to the web-based path
to your Bugzilla installation):
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/localconfig filter_deny
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/*.pl filter_deny
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/localconfig filter_deny
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/processmail filter_deny
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/syncshadowdb filter_deny
ns_register_filter preauth GET /bugzilla/runtests.sh filter_deny
proc filter_deny { why } {
ns_log Notice "filter_deny"
return "filter_return"
}
Warning
This doesn't appear to account for everything mentioned in Section
5.6. In particular, it doesn't block access to the data or template
directories. It also doesn't account for the editor backup files that
were the topic of bug 186383, Bugtraq ID 6501, and a partial cause for
the 2.16.2 release.
_________________________________________________________________
4.5. Troubleshooting
This section gives solutions to common Bugzilla installation problems.
_________________________________________________________________
4.5.1. Bundle::Bugzilla makes me upgrade to Perl 5.6.1
Try executing perl -MCPAN -e 'install CPAN' and then continuing.
Certain older versions of the CPAN toolset were somewhat naive about
how to upgrade Perl modules. When a couple of modules got rolled into
the core Perl distribution for 5.6.1, CPAN thought that the best way
to get those modules up to date was to haul down the Perl distribution
itself and build it. Needless to say, this has caused headaches for
just about everybody. Upgrading to a newer version of CPAN with the
commandline above should fix things.
_________________________________________________________________
4.5.2. DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed
The following error message may appear due to a bug in DBD::mysql
(over which the Bugzilla team have no control):
DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed: Cannot determine NUM_OF_FIELDS at D:/Perl/site
/lib/DBD/mysql.pm line 248.
SV = NULL(0x0) at 0x20fc444
REFCNT = 1
FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY)
To fix this, go to /lib/DBD/sponge.pm in your Perl
installation and replace
my $numFields;
if ($attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'};
} elsif ($attribs->{'NAME'}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAME}};
by
my $numFields;
if ($attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'};
} elsif ($attribs->{'NAMES'}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAMES}};
(note the S added to NAME.)
_________________________________________________________________
4.5.3. cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue)
If you are installing Bugzilla on SuSE Linux, or some other
distributions with "paranoid" security options, it is possible that
the checksetup.pl script may fail with the error:
cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue): Permission denied
This is because your /var/spool/mqueue directory has a mode of
"drwx------". Type chmod 755 /var/spool/mqueue as root to fix this
problem.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 5. Administering Bugzilla
5.1. Bugzilla Configuration
Bugzilla is configured by changing various parameters, accessed from
the "Edit parameters" link in the page footer. Here are some of the
key parameters on that page. You should run down this list and set
them appropriately after installing Bugzilla.
1. maintainer: The maintainer parameter is the email address of the
person responsible for maintaining this Bugzilla installation. The
address need not be that of a valid Bugzilla account.
2. urlbase: This parameter defines the fully qualified domain name
and web server path to your Bugzilla installation.
For example, if your Bugzilla query page is
http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/query.cgi, set your "urlbase" to
http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/.
3. makeproductgroups: This dictates whether or not to automatically
create groups when new products are created.
4. useentrygroupdefault: Bugzilla products can have a group
associated with them, so that certain users can only see bugs in
certain products. When this parameter is set to "on", this causes
the initial group controls on newly created products to place all
newly-created bugs in the group having the same name as the
product immediately. After a product is initially created, the
group controls can be further adjusted without interference by
this mechanism.
5. shadowdb: You run into an interesting problem when Bugzilla
reaches a high level of continuous activity. MySQL supports only
table-level write locking. What this means is that if someone
needs to make a change to a bug, they will lock the entire table
until the operation is complete. Locking for write also blocks
reads until the write is complete. Note that more recent versions
of mysql support row level locking using different table types.
These types are slower than the standard type, and Bugzilla does
not yet take advantage of features such as transactions which
would justify this speed decrease. The Bugzilla team are, however,
happy to hear about any experiences with row level locking and
Bugzilla
The "shadowdb" parameter was designed to get around this
limitation. While only a single user is allowed to write to a
table at a time, reads can continue unimpeded on a read-only
shadow copy of the database. Although your database size will
double, a shadow database can cause an enormous performance
improvement when implemented on extremely high-traffic Bugzilla
databases.
As a guide, mozilla.org began needing "shadowdb" when they reached
around 40,000 Bugzilla users with several hundred Bugzilla bug
changes and comments per day.
The value of the parameter defines the name of the shadow bug
database. You will need to set the host and port settings from the
params page, and set up replication in your database server so
that updates reach this readonly mirror. Consult your database
documentation for more detail.
6. shutdownhtml: If you need to shut down Bugzilla to perform
administration, enter some descriptive HTML here and anyone who
tries to use Bugzilla will receive a page to that effect.
Obviously, editparams.cgi will still be accessible so you can
remove the HTML and re-enable Bugzilla. :-)
7. passwordmail: Every time a user creates an account, the text of
this parameter (with substitutions) is sent to the new user along
with their password message.
Add any text you wish to the "passwordmail" parameter box. For
instance, many people choose to use this box to give a quick
training blurb about how to use Bugzilla at your site.
8. movebugs: This option is an undocumented feature to allow moving
bugs between separate Bugzilla installations. You will need to
understand the source code in order to use this feature. Please
consult movebugs.pl in your Bugzilla source tree for further
documentation, such as it is.
9. useqacontact: This allows you to define an email address for each
component, in addition to that of the default owner, who will be
sent carbon copies of incoming bugs.
10. usestatuswhiteboard: This defines whether you wish to have a
free-form, overwritable field associated with each bug. The
advantage of the Status Whiteboard is that it can be deleted or
modified with ease, and provides an easily-searchable field for
indexing some bugs that have some trait in common.
11. whinedays: Set this to the number of days you want to let bugs go
in the NEW or REOPENED state before notifying people they have
untouched new bugs. If you do not plan to use this feature, simply
do not set up the whining cron job described in the installation
instructions, or set this value to "0" (never whine).
12. commenton*: All these fields allow you to dictate what changes can
pass without comment, and which must have a comment from the
person who changed them. Often, administrators will allow users to
add themselves to the CC list, accept bugs, or change the Status
Whiteboard without adding a comment as to their reasons for the
change, yet require that most other changes come with an
explanation.
Set the "commenton" options according to your site policy. It is a
wise idea to require comments when users resolve, reassign, or
reopen bugs at the very least.
Note
It is generally far better to require a developer comment when
resolving bugs than not. Few things are more annoying to bug database
users than having a developer mark a bug "fixed" without any comment
as to what the fix was (or even that it was truly fixed!)
13. supportwatchers: Turning on this option allows users to ask to
receive copies of all a particular other user's bug email. This
is, of course, subject to the groupset restrictions on the bug; if
the "watcher" would not normally be allowed to view a bug, the
watcher cannot get around the system by setting herself up to
watch the bugs of someone with bugs outside her privileges. They
would still only receive email updates for those bugs she could
normally view.
_________________________________________________________________
5.2. User Administration
5.2.1. Creating the Default User
When you first run checksetup.pl after installing Bugzilla, it will
prompt you for the administrative username (email address) and
password for this "super user". If for some reason you delete the
"super user" account, re-running checksetup.pl will again prompt you
for this username and password.
Tip
If you wish to add more administrative users, add them to the "admin"
group and, optionally, add edit the tweakparams, editusers,
creategroups, editcomponents, and editkeywords groups to add the
entire admin group to those groups.
_________________________________________________________________
5.2.2. Managing Other Users
5.2.2.1. Creating new users
Your users can create their own user accounts by clicking the "New
Account" link at the bottom of each page (assuming they aren't logged
in as someone else already.) However, should you desire to create user
accounts ahead of time, here is how you do it.
1. After logging in, click the "Users" link at the footer of the
query page, and then click "Add a new user".
2. Fill out the form presented. This page is self-explanatory. When
done, click "Submit".
Note
Adding a user this way will not send an email informing them of their
username and password. While useful for creating dummy accounts
(watchers which shuttle mail to another system, for instance, or email
addresses which are a mailing list), in general it is preferable to
log out and use the "New Account" button to create users, as it will
pre-populate all the required fields and also notify the user of her
account name and password.
_________________________________________________________________
5.2.2.2. Modifying Users
To see a specific user, search for their login name in the box
provided on the "Edit Users" page. To see all users, leave the box
blank.
You can search in different ways the listbox to the right of the text
entry box. You can match by case-insensitive substring (the default),
regular expression, or a reverse regular expression match, which finds
every user name which does NOT match the regular expression. (Please
see the man regexp manual page for details on regular expression
syntax.)
Once you have found your user, you can change the following fields:
* Login Name: This is generally the user's full email address.
However, if you have are using the emailsuffix Param, this may
just be the user's login name. Note that users can now change
their login names themselves (to any valid email address.)
* Real Name: The user's real name. Note that Bugzilla does not
require this to create an account.
* Password: You can change the user's password here. Users can
automatically request a new password, so you shouldn't need to do
this often. If you want to disable an account, see Disable Text
below.
* Disable Text: If you type anything in this box, including just a
space, the user is prevented from logging in, or making any
changes to bugs via the web interface. The HTML you type in this
box is presented to the user when they attempt to perform these
actions, and should explain why the account was disabled.
Warning
Don't disable the administrator account!
Note
The user can still submit bugs via the e-mail gateway, if you set it
up, even if the disabled text field is filled in. The e-mail gateway
should not be enabled for secure installations of Bugzilla.
* : If you have created some groups, e.g.
"securitysensitive", then checkboxes will appear here to allow you
to add users to, or remove them from, these groups.
* canconfirm: This field is only used if you have enabled the
"unconfirmed" status. If you enable this for a user, that user can
then move bugs from "Unconfirmed" to a "Confirmed" status (e.g.:
"New" status).
* creategroups: This option will allow a user to create and destroy
groups in Bugzilla.
* editbugs: Unless a user has this bit set, they can only edit those
bugs for which they are the assignee or the reporter. Even if this
option is unchecked, users can still add comments to bugs.
* editcomponents: This flag allows a user to create new products and
components, as well as modify and destroy those that have no bugs
associated with them. If a product or component has bugs
associated with it, those bugs must be moved to a different
product or component before Bugzilla will allow them to be
destroyed.
* editkeywords: If you use Bugzilla's keyword functionality,
enabling this feature allows a user to create and destroy
keywords. As always, the keywords for existing bugs containing the
keyword the user wishes to destroy must be changed before Bugzilla
will allow it to die.
* editusers: This flag allows a user to do what you're doing right
now: edit other users. This will allow those with the right to do
so to remove administrator privileges from other users or grant
them to themselves. Enable with care.
* tweakparams: This flag allows a user to change Bugzilla's Params
(using editparams.cgi.)
* : This allows an administrator to specify the
products in which a user can see bugs. The user must still have
the "editbugs" privilege to edit bugs in these products.
_________________________________________________________________
5.3. Product, Component, Milestone, and Version Administration
5.3.1. Products
Products are the broadest category in Bugzilla, and tend to represent
real-world shipping products. E.g. if your company makes computer
games, you should have one product per game, perhaps a "Common"
product for units of technology used in multiple games, and maybe a
few special products (Website, Administration...)
Many of Bugzilla's settings are configurable on a per-product basis.
The number of "votes" available to users is set per-product, as is the
number of votes required to move a bug automatically from the
UNCONFIRMED status to the NEW status.
To create a new product:
1. Select "products" from the footer
2. Select the "Add" link in the bottom right
3. Enter the name of the product and a description. The Description
field may contain HTML.
Don't worry about the "Closed for bug entry", "Maximum Votes per
person", "Maximum votes a person can put on a single bug", "Number of
votes a bug in this Product needs to automatically get out of the
UNCOMFIRMED state", and "Version" options yet. We'll cover those in a
few moments.
_________________________________________________________________
5.3.2. Components
Components are subsections of a Product. E.g. the computer game you
are designing may have a "UI" component, an "API" component, a "Sound
System" component, and a "Plugins" component, each overseen by a
different programmer. It often makes sense to divide Components in
Bugzilla according to the natural divisions of responsibility within
your Product or company.
Each component has a owner and (if you turned it on in the
parameters), a QA Contact. The owner should be the primary person who
fixes bugs in that component. The QA Contact should be the person who
will ensure these bugs are completely fixed. The Owner, QA Contact,
and Reporter will get email when new bugs are created in this
Component and when these bugs change. Default Owner and Default QA
Contact fields only dictate the default assignments; these can be
changed on bug submission, or at any later point in a bug's life.
To create a new Component:
1. Select the "Edit components" link from the "Edit product" page
2. Select the "Add" link in the bottom right.
3. Fill out the "Component" field, a short "Description", the
"Initial Owner" and "Initial QA Contact" (if enabled.) The
Component and Description fields may contain HTML; the "Initial
Owner" field must be a login name already existing in the
database.
_________________________________________________________________
5.3.3. Versions
Versions are the revisions of the product, such as "Flinders 3.1",
"Flinders 95", and "Flinders 2000". Version is not a multi-select
field; the usual practice is to select the most recent version with
the bug.
To create and edit Versions:
1. From the "Edit product" screen, select "Edit Versions"
2. You will notice that the product already has the default version
"undefined". Click the "Add" link in the bottom right.
3. Enter the name of the Version. This field takes text only. Then
click the "Add" button.
_________________________________________________________________
5.3.4. Milestones
Milestones are "targets" that you plan to get a bug fixed by. For
example, you have a bug that you plan to fix for your 3.0 release, it
would be assigned the milestone of 3.0.
Note
Milestone options will only appear for a Product if you turned on the
"usetargetmilestone" Param in the "Edit Parameters" screen.
To create new Milestones, set Default Milestones, and set Milestone
URL:
1. Select "Edit milestones" from the "Edit product" page.
2. Select "Add" in the bottom right corner. text
3. Enter the name of the Milestone in the "Milestone" field. You can
optionally set the "sortkey", which is a positive or negative
number (-255 to 255) that defines where in the list this
particular milestone appears. This is because milestones often do
not occur in alphanumeric order For example, "Future" might be
after "Release 1.2". Select "Add".
4. From the Edit product screen, you can enter the URL of a page
which gives information about your milestones and what they mean.
Tip
If you want your milestone document to be restricted so that it can
only be viewed by people in a particular Bugzilla group, the best way
is to attach the document to a bug in that group, and make the URL the
URL of that attachment.
_________________________________________________________________
5.4. Voting
Voting allows users to be given a pot of votes which they can allocate
to bugs, to indicate that they'd like them fixed. This allows
developers to gauge user need for a particular enhancement or bugfix.
By allowing bugs with a certain number of votes to automatically move
from "UNCONFIRMED" to "NEW", users of the bug system can help
high-priority bugs garner attention so they don't sit for a long time
awaiting triage.
To modify Voting settings:
1. Navigate to the "Edit product" screen for the Product you wish to
modify
2. Maximum Votes per person: Setting this field to "0" disables
voting.
3. Maximum Votes a person can put on a single bug": It should
probably be some number lower than the "Maximum votes per person".
Don't set this field to "0" if "Maximum votes per person" is
non-zero; that doesn't make any sense.
4. Number of votes a bug in this product needs to automatically get
out of the UNCONFIRMED state: Setting this field to "0" disables
the automatic move of bugs from UNCONFIRMED to NEW.
5. Once you have adjusted the values to your preference, click
"Update".
_________________________________________________________________
5.5. Groups and Group Security
Groups allow the administrator to isolate bugs or products that should
only be seen by certain people. The association between products and
groups is controlled from the product edit page under "Edit Group
Controls."
If the makeproductgroups param is on, a new group will be
automatically created for every new product.
On the product edit page, there is a page to edit the "Group Controls"
for a product and determine which groups are applicable, default, and
mandatory for each product as well as controlling entry for each
product and being able to set bugs in a product to be totally
read-only unless some group restrictions are met.
For each group, it is possible to specify if membership in that group
is...
1. required for bug entry,
2. Not applicable to this product(NA), a possible restriction for a
member of the group to place on a bug in this product(Shown), a
default restriction for a member of the group to place on a bug in
this product(Default), or a mandatory restriction to be placed on
bugs in this product(Mandatory).
3. Not applicable by non-members to this product(NA), a possible
restriction for a non-member of the group to place on a bug in
this product(Shown), a default restriction for a non-member of the
group to place on a bug in this product(Default), or a mandatory
restriction to be placed on bugs in this product when entered by a
non-member(Mandatory).
4. required in order to make any change to bugs in this product
including comments.
To create Groups:
1. Select the "groups" link in the footer.
2. Take a moment to understand the instructions on the "Edit Groups"
screen, then select the "Add Group" link.
3. Fill out the "Group", "Description", and "User RegExp" fields.
"User RegExp" allows you to automatically place all users who
fulfill the Regular Expression into the new group. When you have
finished, click "Add".
Warning
The User Regexp is a perl regexp and, if not anchored, will match any
part of an address. So, if you do not want to grant access into
'mycompany.com' to 'badperson@mycompany.com.hacker.net', use
'@mycompany\.com$' as the regexp.
4. After you add your new group, edit the new group. On the edit
page, you can specify other groups that should be included in this
group and which groups should be permitted to add and delete users
from this group.
Note that group permissions are such that you need to be a member of
all the groups a bug is in, for whatever reason, to see that bug.
Similarly, you must be a member of all of the entry groups for a
product to add bugs to a product and you must be a member of all of
the canedit groups for a product in order to make any change to bugs
in that product.
_________________________________________________________________
5.6. Bugzilla Security
Warning
Poorly-configured MySQL and Bugzilla installations have given
attackers full access to systems in the past. Please take these
guidelines seriously, even for Bugzilla machines hidden away behind
your firewall. 80% of all computer trespassers are insiders, not
anonymous crackers.
Note
These instructions must, of necessity, be somewhat vague since
Bugzilla runs on so many different platforms. If you have refinements
of these directions for specific platforms, please submit them to
mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org
To secure your installation:
1. There is no substitute for understanding the tools on your system!
Read The MySQL Privilege System until you can recite it from
memory!
2. Lock down /etc/inetd.conf. Heck, disable inet entirely on this
box. It should only listen to port 25 for Sendmail and port 80 for
Apache.
3. Do not run Apache as "nobody" . This will require very lax
permissions in your Bugzilla directories. Run it, instead, as a
user with a name, set via your httpd.conf file.
Note
"nobody" is a real user on UNIX systems. Having a process run as user
id "nobody" is absolutely no protection against system crackers versus
using any other user account. As a general security measure, I
recommend you create unique user ID's for each daemon running on your
system and, if possible, use "chroot" to jail that process away from
the rest of your system.
4. Ensure you have adequate access controls for the
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ directory, as well as the
$BUGZILLA_HOME/localconfig file. The localconfig file stores your
"bugs" database account password. In addition, some files under
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ store sensitive information.
Also, beware that some text editors create backup files in the
current working directory so you need to also secure files like
localconfig~.
Note
Simply blocking .*localconfig.* won't work because the QuickSearch
feature requires the web browser to be able to retrieve localconfig.js
and others may be introduced in the future (see bug 186383 for more
information.
Bugzilla provides default .htaccess files to protect the most
common Apache installations. However, you should verify these are
adequate according to the site-wide security policy of your web
server, and ensure that the .htaccess files are allowed to
"override" default permissions set in your Apache configuration
files. Covering Apache security is beyond the scope of this Guide;
please consult the Apache documentation for details.
If you are using a web server that does not support the .htaccess
control method, you are at risk! After installing, check to see if
you can view the file localconfig in your web browser (e.g.:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/localconfig ). If you can read the
contents of this file, your web server has not secured your
bugzilla directory properly and you must fix this problem before
deploying Bugzilla. If, however, it gives you a "Forbidden" error,
then it probably respects the .htaccess conventions and you are
good to go.
5. When you run checksetup.pl, the script will attempt to modify
various permissions on files which Bugzilla uses. If you do not
have a webservergroup set in the localconfig file, then Bugzilla
will have to make certain files world readable and/or writable.
THIS IS INSECURE! . This means that anyone who can get access to
your system can do whatever they want to your Bugzilla
installation.
Note
This also means that if your webserver runs all cgi scripts as the
same user/group, anyone on the system who can run cgi scripts will be
able to take control of your Bugzilla installation.
On Apache, you can use .htaccess files to protect access to these
directories, as outlined in Bugs 57161 and 186383 for the
localconfig file, and Bug 65572 for adequate protection in your
data/ directory. Also, don't forget about the template/ and
Bugzilla/ directories and to allow access to the data/webdot
directory for the 192.20.225.10 IP address if you are using webdot
from research.att.com. The easiest way to accomplish this is to
set $create_htaccess to 1 in localconfig. However, the information
below is provided for those that want to know exactly what is
created.
FIX ME BEFORE RELEASE!!!!! Note the instructions which follow are
Apache-specific. If you use IIS, Netscape, or other non-Apache web
servers, please consult your system documentation for how to
secure these files from being transmitted to curious users.
_________________________________________________________________
5.7. Template Customization
One of the large changes for 2.16 was the templatization of the entire
user-facing UI, using the Template Toolkit. Administrators can now
configure the look and feel of Bugzilla without having to edit Perl
files or face the nightmare of massive merge conflicts when they
upgrade to a newer version in the future.
Templatization also makes localized versions of Bugzilla possible, for
the first time. In the future, a Bugzilla installation may have
templates installed for multiple localizations, and select which ones
to use based on the user's browser language setting.
_________________________________________________________________
5.7.1. What to Edit
There are two different ways of editing of Bugzilla's templates, and
which you use depends mainly on how you upgrade Bugzilla. The template
directory structure is that there's a top level directory, template,
which contains a directory for each installed localization. The
default English templates are therefore in en. Underneath that, there
is the default directory and optionally the custom directory. The
default directory contains all the templates shipped with Bugzilla,
whereas the custom directory does not exist at first and must be
created if you want to use it.
The first method of making customizations is to directly edit the
templates in template/en/default. This is probably the best method for
small changes if you are going to use the CVS method of upgrading,
because if you then execute a cvs update, any template fixes will get
automagically merged into your modified versions.
If you use this method, your installation will break if CVS conflicts
occur.
The other method is to copy the templates into a mirrored directory
structure under template/en/custom. The templates in this directory
automatically override those in default. This is the technique you
need to use if you use the overwriting method of upgrade, because
otherwise your changes will be lost. This method is also better if you
are using the CVS method of upgrading and are going to make major
changes, because it is guaranteed that the contents of this directory
will not be touched during an upgrade, and you can then decide whether
to continue using your own templates, or make the effort to merge your
changes into the new versions by hand.
If you use this method, your installation may break if incompatible
changes are made to the template interface. If such changes are made
they will be documented in the release notes, provided you are using a
stable release of Bugzilla. If you use using unstable code, you will
need to deal with this one yourself, although if possible the changes
will be mentioned before they occur in the deprecations section of the
previous stable release's release notes.
Note
Don't directly edit the compiled templates in data/template/* - your
changes will be lost when Template Toolkit recompiles them.
_________________________________________________________________
5.7.2. How To Edit Templates
The syntax of the Template Toolkit language is beyond the scope of
this guide. It's reasonably easy to pick up by looking at the current
templates; or, you can read the manual, available on the Template
Toolkit home page. However, you should particularly remember (for
security reasons) to always HTML filter things which come from the
database or user input, to prevent cross-site scripting attacks.
However, one thing you should take particular care about is the need
to properly HTML filter data that has been passed into the template.
This means that if the data can possibly contain special HTML
characters such as <, and the data was not intended to be HTML, they
need to be converted to entity form, ie <. You use the 'html'
filter in the Template Toolkit to do this. If you fail to do this, you
may open up your installation to cross-site scripting attacks.
Also note that Bugzilla adds a few filters of its own, that are not in
standard Template Toolkit. In particular, the 'url_quote' filter can
convert characters that are illegal or have special meaning in URLs,
such as &, to the encoded form, ie %26. This actually encodes most
characters (but not the common ones such as letters and numbers and so
on), including the HTML-special characters, so there's never a need to
HTML filter afterwards.
Editing templates is a good way of doing a "poor man's custom fields".
For example, if you don't use the Status Whiteboard, but want to have
a free-form text entry box for "Build Identifier", then you can just
edit the templates to change the field labels. It's still be called
status_whiteboard internally, but your users don't need to know that.
Note
If you are making template changes that you intend on submitting back
for inclusion in standard Bugzilla, you should read the relevant
sections of the Developers' Guide.
_________________________________________________________________
5.7.3. Template Formats
Some CGIs have the ability to use more than one template. For example,
buglist.cgi can output bug lists as RDF or two different forms of HTML
(complex and simple). (Try this out by appending &format=simple to a
buglist.cgi URL on your Bugzilla installation.) This mechanism, called
template 'formats', is extensible.
To see if a CGI supports multiple output formats, grep the CGI for
"ValidateOutputFormat". If it's not present, adding multiple format
support isn't too hard - see how it's done in other CGIs.
To make a new format template for a CGI which supports this, open a
current template for that CGI and take note of the INTERFACE comment
(if present.) This comment defines what variables are passed into this
template. If there isn't one, I'm afraid you'll have to read the
template and the code to find out what information you get.
Write your template in whatever markup or text style is appropriate.
You now need to decide what content type you want your template served
as. Open up the localconfig file and find the $contenttypes variable.
If your content type is not there, add it. Remember the three- or
four-letter tag assigned to you content type. This tag will be part of
the template filename.
Save the template as -..tmpl.
Try out the template by calling the CGI as
.cgi?format= .
_________________________________________________________________
5.7.4. Particular Templates
There are a few templates you may be particularly interested in
customizing for your installation.
index.html.tmpl: This is the Bugzilla front page.
global/header.html.tmpl: This defines the header that goes on all
Bugzilla pages. The header includes the banner, which is what appears
to users and is probably what you want to edit instead. However the
header also includes the HTML HEAD section, so you could for example
add a stylesheet or META tag by editing the header.
global/banner.html.tmpl: This contains the "banner", the part of the
header that appears at the top of all Bugzilla pages. The default
banner is reasonably barren, so you'll probably want to customize this
to give your installation a distinctive look and feel. It is
recommended you preserve the Bugzilla version number in some form so
the version you are running can be determined, and users know what
docs to read.
global/footer.html.tmpl: This defines the footer that goes on all
Bugzilla pages. Editing this is another way to quickly get a
distinctive look and feel for your Bugzilla installation.
bug/create/user-message.html.tmpl: This is a message that appears near
the top of the bug reporting page. By modifying this, you can tell
your users how they should report bugs.
bug/process/midair.html.tmpl: This is the page used if two people
submit simultaneous changes to the same bug. The second person to
submit their changes will get this page to tell them what the first
person did, and ask if they wish to overwrite those changes or go back
and revisit the bug. The default title and header on this page read
"Mid-air collision detected!" If you work in the aviation industry, or
other environment where this might be found offensive (yes, we have
true stories of this happening) you'll want to change this to
something more appropriate for your environment.
bug/create/create.html.tmpl and bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl: You may
wish to get bug submitters to give certain bits of structured
information, each in a separate input widget, for which there is not a
field in the database. The bug entry system has been designed in an
extensible fashion to enable you to define arbitrary fields and
widgets, and have their values appear formatted in the initial
Description, rather than in database fields. An example of this is the
mozilla.org guided bug submission form.
To make this work, create a custom template for enter_bug.cgi (the
default template, on which you could base it, is create.html.tmpl),
and either call it create.html.tmpl or use a format and call it
create-.html.tmpl. Put it in the custom/bug/create
directory. In it, add widgets for each piece of information you'd like
collected - such as a build number, or set of steps to reproduce.
Then, create a template like custom/bug/create/comment.txt.tmpl, also
named after your format if you are using one, which references the
form fields you have created. When a bug report is submitted, the
initial comment attached to the bug report will be formatted according
to the layout of this template.
For example, if your enter_bug template had a field
and then your comment.txt.tmpl had
BuildID: [% form.buildid %]
then
BuildID: 20020303
would appear in the initial checkin comment.
_________________________________________________________________
5.8. Change Permission Customization
Warning
This feature should be considered experimental; the Bugzilla code you
will be changing is not stable, and could change or move between
versions. Be aware that if you make modifications to it, you may have
to re-make them or port them if Bugzilla changes internally between
versions.
Companies often have rules about which employees, or classes of
employees, are allowed to change certain things in the bug system. For
example, only the bug's designated QA Contact may be allowed to VERIFY
the bug. Bugzilla has been designed to make it easy for you to write
your own custom rules to define who is allowed to make what sorts of
value transition.
For maximum flexibility, customizing this means editing Bugzilla's
Perl code. This gives the administrator complete control over exactly
who is allowed to do what. The relevant function is called
CheckCanChangeField(), and is found in process_bug.cgi in your
Bugzilla directory. If you open that file and grep for "sub
CheckCanChangeField", you'll find it.
This function has been carefully commented to allow you to see exactly
how it works, and give you an idea of how to make changes to it.
Certain marked sections should not be changed - these are the
"plumbing" which makes the rest of the function work. In between those
sections, you'll find snippets of code like:
# Allow the owner to change anything.
if ($ownerid eq $whoid) {
return 1;
}
It's fairly obvious what this piece of code does.
So, how does one go about changing this function? Well, simple changes
can be made just be removing pieces - for example, if you wanted to
prevent any user adding a comment to a bug, just remove the lines
marked "Allow anyone to change comments." And if you want the reporter
to have no special rights on bugs they have filed, just remove the
entire section which refers to him.
More complex customizations are not much harder. Basically, you add a
check in the right place in the function, i.e. after all the variables
you are using have been set up. So, don't look at $ownerid before
$ownerid has been obtained from the database. You can either add a
positive check, which returns 1 (allow) if certain conditions are
true, or a negative check, which returns 0 (deny.) E.g.:
if ($field eq "qacontact") {
if (UserInGroup("quality_assurance")) {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}
This says that only users in the group "quality_assurance" can change
the QA Contact field of a bug. Getting more weird:
if (($field eq "priority") &&
($vars->{'user'}{'login'} =~ /.*\@example\.com$/))
{
if ($oldvalue eq "P1") {
return 1;
}
else {
return 0;
}
}
This says that if the user is trying to change the priority field, and
their email address is @example.com, they can only do so if the old
value of the field was "P1". Not very useful, but illustrative.
For a list of possible field names, look in data/versioncache for the
list called @::log_columns. If you need help writing custom rules for
your organization, ask in the newsgroup.
_________________________________________________________________
5.9. Upgrading to New Releases
Upgrading Bugzilla is something we all want to do from time to time,
be it to get new features or pick up the latest security fix. How easy
it is to update depends on a few factors.
* If the new version is a revision or a new point release
* How many, if any, local changes have been made
There are also three different methods to upgrade your installation.
1. Using CVS (Example 5-1)
2. Downloading a new tarball (Example 5-2)
3. Applying the relevant patches (Example 5-3)
Which options are available to you may depend on how large a jump you
are making and/or your network configuration.
Revisions are normally released to fix security vulnerabilities and
are distinguished by an increase in the third number. For example,
when 2.16.2 was released, it was a revision to 2.16.1.
Point releases are normally released when the Bugzilla team feels that
there has been a significant amount of progress made between the last
point release and the current time. These are often proceeded by a
stabilization period and release candidates, however the use of
development versions or release candidates is beyond the scope of this
document. Point releases can be distinguished by an increase in the
second number, or minor version. For example, 2.16.2 is a newer point
release than 2.14.5.
The examples in this section are written as if you were updating to
version 2.16.2. The procedures are the same regardless if you are
updating to a new point release or a new revision. However, the chance
of running into trouble increases when upgrading to a new point
release, escpecially if you've made local changes.
These examples also assume that your Bugzilla installation is at
/var/www/html/bugzilla. If that is not the case, simply substitute the
proper paths where appropriate.
Example 5-1. Upgrading using CVS
Every release of Bugzilla, whether it is a revision or a point
release, is tagged in CVS. Also, every tarball we have distributed
since version 2.12 has been primed for using CVS. This does, however,
require that you are able to access cvs-mirror.mozilla.org on port
2401.
Tip
If you can do this, updating using CVS is probably the most painless
method, especially if you have a lot of local changes.
bash$ cd /var/www/html/bugzilla
bash$ cvs login
Logging in to :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:2401/cvsroot
CVS password: anonymous
bash$ cvs -q update -r BUGZILLA-2_16_2 -dP
P checksetup.pl
P collectstats.pl
P globals.pl
P docs/rel_notes.txt
P template/en/default/list/quips.html.tmpl
Caution
If a line in the output from cvs update begins with a C that
represents a file with local changes that CVS was unable to properly
merge. You need to resolve these conflicts manually before Bugzilla
(or at least the portion using that file) will be usable.
Note
You also need to run ./checksetup.pl before your Bugzilla upgrade will
be complete.
Example 5-2. Upgrading using the tarball
If you are unable or unwilling to use CVS, another option that's
always available is to download the latest tarball. This is the most
difficult option to use, especially if you have local changes.
bash$ cd /var/www/html
bash$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/webtools/bugzilla-2.16.2.tar.gz
Output omitted
bash$ tar xzvf bugzilla-2.16.2.tar.gz
bugzilla-2.16.2/
bugzilla-2.16.2/.cvsignore
bugzilla-2.16.2/1x1.gif
Output truncated
bash$ cd bugzilla-2.16.2
bash$ cp ../bugzilla/localconfig* .
bash$ cp -r ../bugzilla/data .
bash$ cd ..
bash$ mv bugzilla bugzilla.old
bash$ mv bugzilla-2.16.2 bugzilla
bash$ cd bugzilla
bash$ ./checksetup.pl
Output omitted
Warning
The cp commands both end with periods which is a very important
detail, it tells the shell that the destination directory is the
current working directory. Also, the period at the beginning of the
./checksetup.pl is important and can not be omitted.
Note
You will now have to reapply any changes you have made to your local
installation manually.
Example 5-3. Upgrading using patches
The Bugzilla team will normally make a patch file available for
revisions to go from the most recent revision to the new one. You
could also read the release notes and grab the patches attached to the
mentioned bug, but it is safer to use the released patch file as
sometimes patches get changed before they get checked in (for minor
spelling fixes and the like). It is also theorectically possible to
scour the fixed bug list and pick and choose which patches to apply
from a point release, but this is not recommended either as what
you'll end up with is a hodge podge Bugzilla that isn't really any
version. This would also make it more difficult to upgrade in the
future.
bash$ cd /var/www/html/bugzilla
bash$ wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/webtools/bugzilla-2.16.1-to-2.16.2.diff.gz
Output omitted
bash$ gunzip bugzilla-2.16.1-to-2.16.2.diff.gz
bash$ patch -p1 < bugzilla-2.16.1-to-2.16.2.diff
patching file checksetup.pl
patching file collectstats.pl
patching file globals.pl
Caution
If you do this, beware that this doesn't change the entires in your
CVS directory so it may make updates using CVS (Example 5-1) more
difficult in the future.
_________________________________________________________________
5.10. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools
5.10.1. Bonsai
Bonsai is a web-based tool for managing CVS, the Concurrent Versioning
System . Using Bonsai, administrators can control open/closed status
of trees, query a fast relational database back-end for change,
branch, and comment information, and view changes made since the last
time the tree was closed. Bonsai also integrates with Tinderbox, the
Mozilla automated build management system.
_________________________________________________________________
5.10.2. CVS
CVS integration is best accomplished, at this point, using the
Bugzilla Email Gateway.
Follow the instructions in this Guide for enabling Bugzilla e-mail
integration. Ensure that your check-in script sends an email to your
Bugzilla e-mail gateway with the subject of "[Bug XXXX]", and you can
have CVS check-in comments append to your Bugzilla bug. If you want to
have the bug be closed automatically, you'll have to modify the
contrib/bugzilla_email_append.pl script.
There is also a CVSZilla project, based upon somewhat dated Bugzilla
code, to integrate CVS and Bugzilla through CVS' ability to email.
Check it out at: http://homepages.kcbbs.gen.nz/~tonyg/.
_________________________________________________________________
5.10.3. Perforce SCM
You can find the project page for Bugzilla and Teamtrack Perforce
integration (p4dti) at: http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti .
"p4dti" is now an officially supported product from Perforce, and you
can find the "Perforce Public Depot" p4dti page at
http://public.perforce.com/public/perforce/p4dti/index.html .
Integration of Perforce with Bugzilla, once patches are applied, is
seamless. Perforce replication information will appear below the
comments of each bug. Be certain you have a matching set of patches
for the Bugzilla version you are installing. p4dti is designed to
support multiple defect trackers, and maintains its own documentation
for it. Please consult the pages linked above for further information.
_________________________________________________________________
5.10.4. Tinderbox/Tinderbox2
We need Tinderbox integration information.
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix A. The Bugzilla FAQ
This FAQ includes questions not covered elsewhere in the Guide.
1. General Questions
A.1.1. Where can I find information about Bugzilla?
A.1.2. What license is Bugzilla distributed under?
A.1.3. How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?
A.1.4. What major companies or projects are currently using
Bugzilla for bug-tracking?
A.1.5. Who maintains Bugzilla?
A.1.6. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking
databases?
A.1.7. Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or
compatibility with this other tracking software?
A.1.8. Why MySQL? I'm interested in seeing Bugzilla run on
Oracle/Sybase/Msql/PostgreSQL/MSSQL.
A.1.9. Why do the scripts say "/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl" instead
of "/usr/bin/perl" or something else?
A.1.10. Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?
2. Managerial Questions
A.2.1. Is Bugzilla web-based, or do you have to have specific
software or a specific operating system on your machine?
A.2.2. Can Bugzilla integrate with Perforce (SCM software)?
A.2.3. Does Bugzilla allow the user to track multiple projects?
A.2.4. If I am on many projects, and search for all bugs assigned
to me, will Bugzilla list them for me and allow me to
sort by project, severity etc?
A.2.5. Does Bugzilla allow attachments (text, screenshots, URLs
etc)? If yes, are there any that are NOT allowed?
A.2.6. Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and
levels? Do we have complete freedom to change the labels
of fields and format of them, and the choice of
acceptable values?
A.2.7. Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics,
graphs, etc? You know, the type of stuff that management
likes to see. :)
A.2.8. Is there email notification and if so, what do you see
when you get an email?
A.2.9. Can email notification be set up to send to multiple
people, some on the To List, CC List, BCC List etc?
A.2.10. Do users have to have any particular type of email
application?
A.2.11. Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If
I had outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug
template, could that template be imported into "matching"
fields? If I wanted to take the results of a query and
export that data to MS Excel, could I do that?
A.2.12. Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be
used in other countries? Is it localizable?
A.2.13. Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in
Word format? Excel format?
A.2.14. Does Bugzilla have the ability to search by word, phrase,
compound search?
A.2.15. Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is
simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second
person get a notice that the bug is in use or how are
they notified?
A.2.16. Are there any backup features provided?
A.2.17. Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?
A.2.18. What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to
install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of
skills does the person need to have? I need to find out
if we were to go with Bugzilla, what types of individuals
would we need to hire and how much would that cost vs
buying an "Out-of-the-Box" solution.
A.2.19. What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire
people to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this
something that takes hours or weeks to install and a
couple of hours per week to maintain and customize or is
this a multi-week install process, plus a full time job
for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
A.2.20. Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using
Bugzilla? Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies
needed as identified above?
3. Bugzilla Security
A.3.1. How do I completely disable MySQL security if it's giving
me problems (I've followed the instructions in the
installation section of this guide)?
A.3.2. Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?
A.3.3. I've implemented the security fixes mentioned in Chris
Yeh's security advisory of 5/10/2000 advising not to run
MySQL as root, and am running into problems with MySQL no
longer working correctly.
4. Bugzilla Email
A.4.1. I have a user who doesn't want to receive any more email
from Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this user?
A.4.2. I'm evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don't want it to send
email to anyone but me. How do I do it?
A.4.3. I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something more, or other
than, only new bugs. How do I do it?
A.4.4. I don't like/want to use Procmail to hand mail off to
bug_email.pl. What alternatives do I have?
A.4.5. How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs
via email?
A.4.6. Email takes FOREVER to reach me from Bugzilla -- it's
extremely slow. What gives?
A.4.7. How come email from Bugzilla changes never reaches me?
5. Bugzilla Database
A.5.1. I've heard Bugzilla can be used with Oracle?
A.5.2. I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid
entries. What do I do?
A.5.3. I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?
A.5.4. I think I've set up MySQL permissions correctly, but
Bugzilla still can't connect.
A.5.5. How do I synchronize bug information among multiple
different Bugzilla databases?
6. Bugzilla and Win32
A.6.1. What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32
(Win98+/NT/2K)?
A.6.2. Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?
A.6.3. CGI's are failing with a "something.cgi is not a valid
Windows NT application" error. Why?
A.6.4. I'm having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being
able to talk to to the database.
7. Bugzilla Usage
A.7.1. How do I change my user name (email address) in Bugzilla?
A.7.2. The query page is very confusing. Isn't there a simpler
way to query?
A.7.3. I'm confused by the behavior of the "accept" button in the
Show Bug form. Why doesn't it assign the bug to me when I
accept it?
A.7.4. I can't upload anything into the database via the "Create
Attachment" link. What am I doing wrong?
A.7.5. How do I change a keyword in Bugzilla, once some bugs are
using it?
8. Bugzilla Hacking
A.8.1. What kind of style should I use for templatization?
A.8.2. What bugs are in Bugzilla right now?
A.8.3. How can I change the default priority to a null value? For
instance, have the default priority be "---" instead of
"P2"?
A.8.4. What's the best way to submit patches? What guidelines
should I follow?
1. General Questions
A.1.1. Where can I find information about Bugzilla?
You can stay up-to-date with the latest Bugzilla information at
http://www.bugzilla.org/
A.1.2. What license is Bugzilla distributed under?
Bugzilla is covered by the Mozilla Public License. See details at
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/
A.1.3. How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?
http://bugzilla.org/consulting.html is a list of people and companies
who have asked us to list them as consultants for Bugzilla.
www.collab.net offers Bugzilla as part of their standard offering to
large projects. They do have some minimum fees that are pretty hefty,
and generally aren't interested in small projects.
There are several experienced Bugzilla hackers on the mailing
list/newsgroup who are willing to make themselves available for
generous compensation. Try sending a message to the mailing list
asking for a volunteer.
A.1.4. What major companies or projects are currently using Bugzilla
for bug-tracking?
There are dozens of major companies with public Bugzilla sites to
track bugs in their products. A few include:
Netscape/AOL
Mozilla.org
NASA
Red Hat Software
SuSe Corp
The Horde Project
AbiSource
Real Time Enterprises, Inc
Eggheads.org
Strata Software
RockLinux
Creative Labs (makers of SoundBlaster)
The Apache Foundation
The Gnome Foundation
Ximian
Linux-Mandrake
Suffice to say, there are more than enough huge projects using
Bugzilla that we can safely say it's extremely popular.
A.1.5. Who maintains Bugzilla?
A core team, led by Dave Miller (justdave@netscape.com).
A.1.6. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking
databases?
We can't find any head-to-head comparisons of Bugzilla against other
defect-tracking software. If you know of one, please get in touch.
However, from the author's personal experience with other
bug-trackers, Bugzilla offers superior performance on commodity
hardware, better price (free!), more developer- friendly features
(such as stored queries, email integration, and platform
independence), improved scalability, open source code, greater
flexibility, and superior ease-of-use.
If you happen to be a commercial bug-tracker vendor, please step
forward with a list of advantages your product has over Bugzilla. We'd
be happy to include it in the "Competitors" section.
A.1.7. Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or
compatibility with this other tracking software?
It may be that the support has not been built yet, or that you have
not yet found it. Bugzilla is making tremendous strides in usability,
customizability, scalability, and user interface. It is widely
considered the most complete and popular open-source bug-tracking
software in existence.
That doesn't mean it can't use improvement! You can help the project
along by either hacking a patch yourself that supports the
functionality you require, or else submitting a "Request for
Enhancement" (RFE) using the bug submission interface at
bugzilla.mozilla.org.
A.1.8. Why MySQL? I'm interested in seeing Bugzilla run on
Oracle/Sybase/Msql/PostgreSQL/MSSQL.
MySQL was originally chosen because it is free, easy to install, and
was available for the hardware Netscape intended to run it on.
There is currently work in progress to make Bugzilla work on
PostgreSQL and Sybase in the default distribution. You can track the
progress of these initiatives in bugs 98304 and 173130 respectively.
Once both of these are done, adding support for additional database
servers should be trivial.
A.1.9. Why do the scripts say "/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl" instead of
"/usr/bin/perl" or something else?
Mozilla.org uses /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl, because originally Terry
wanted a place to put a version of Perl and other tools that was
strictly under his control.
We always recommend that, if possible, you keep the path as
/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl, and simply add symlink. This will make
upgrading your Bugzilla much easier in the future.
A.1.10. Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?
At present, no.
2. Managerial Questions
Note
Questions likely to be asked by managers. :-)
A.2.1. Is Bugzilla web-based, or do you have to have specific software
or a specific operating system on your machine?
It is web and e-mail based. You can edit bugs by sending specially
formatted email to a properly configured Bugzilla, or control via the
web.
A.2.2. Can Bugzilla integrate with Perforce (SCM software)?
Yes! You can find more information elsewhere in "The Bugzilla Guide"
in the "Integration with Third-Party Products" section.
A.2.3. Does Bugzilla allow the user to track multiple projects?
Absolutely! You can track any number of Products that can each be
composed of any number of Components.
A.2.4. If I am on many projects, and search for all bugs assigned to
me, will Bugzilla list them for me and allow me to sort by project,
severity etc?
Yes.
A.2.5. Does Bugzilla allow attachments (text, screenshots, URLs etc)?
If yes, are there any that are NOT allowed?
Yes - any sort of attachment is allowed, although administrators can
configure a maximum size. Bugzilla gives the user the option of either
using the MIME-type supplied by the browser, choosing from a
pre-defined list or manually typing any arbitrary MIME-type.
A.2.6. Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and levels?
Do we have complete freedom to change the labels of fields and format
of them, and the choice of acceptable values?
Yes. However, modifying some fields, notably those related to bug
progression states, also require adjusting the program logic to
compensate for the change.
There is no GUI for adding fields to Bugzilla at this time. You can
follow development of this feature at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=91037
A.2.7. Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics, graphs,
etc? You know, the type of stuff that management likes to see. :)
Yes. Look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi for samples of
what Bugzilla can do in reporting and graphing.
If you can not get the reports you want from the included reporting
scripts, it is possible to hook up a professional reporting package
such as Crystal Reports using ODBC. If you choose to do this, beware
that giving direct access to the database does contain some security
implications. Even if you give read-only access to the bugs database
it will bypass the secure bugs features of Bugzilla.
A.2.8. Is there email notification and if so, what do you see when you
get an email?
Email notification is user-configurable. By default, the bug id and
Summary of the bug report accompany each email notification, along
with a list of the changes made.
A.2.9. Can email notification be set up to send to multiple people,
some on the To List, CC List, BCC List etc?
Yes.
A.2.10. Do users have to have any particular type of email
application?
Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format
on the planet.
Note
If you decide to use the bugzilla_email integration features to allow
Bugzilla to record responses to mail with the associated bug, you may
need to caution your users to set their mailer to "respond to messages
in the format in which they were sent". For security reasons Bugzilla
ignores HTML tags in comments, and if a user sends HTML-based email
into Bugzilla the resulting comment looks downright awful.
A.2.11. Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If I had
outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug template, could
that template be imported into "matching" fields? If I wanted to take
the results of a query and export that data to MS Excel, could I do
that?
Bugzilla can output buglists as HTML (the default), CSV or RDF. The
link for CSV can be found at the bottom of the buglist in HTML format.
This CSV format can easily be imported into MS Excel or other
spread-sheet applications.
To use the RDF format of the buglist it is necessary to append a
&ctype=rdf to the URL. RDF is meant to be machine readable and thus it
is assumed that the URL would be generated progmatically so there is
no user visible link to this format.
Currently the only script included with Bugzilla that can import data
is importxml.pl which is intended to be used for importing the data
generated by xml.cgi in association with bug moving. Any other use is
left as an exercise for the user.
There are also scripts included in the contrib/ directory for using
e-mail to import information into Bugzilla, but these scripts are not
currently supported and included for educational purposes.
A.2.12. Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be used
in other countries? Is it localizable?
Yes. For more information including available translated templates,
see http://www.bugzilla.org/download.html. The admin interfaces are
still not included in these translated templates and is therefore
still English only. Also, there may be issues with the charset not
being declared. See bug 126226 for more information.
A.2.13. Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in Word
format? Excel format?
Yes. No. Yes (using the CSV format).
A.2.14. Does Bugzilla have the ability to search by word, phrase,
compound search?
You have no idea. Bugzilla's query interface, particularly with the
advanced Boolean operators, is incredibly versatile.
A.2.15. Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is
simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second person get a
notice that the bug is in use or how are they notified?
Bugzilla does not lock records. It provides mid-air collision
detection, and offers the offending user a choice of options to deal
with the conflict.
A.2.16. Are there any backup features provided?
MySQL, the database back-end for Bugzilla, allows hot-backup of data.
You can find strategies for dealing with backup considerations at
http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html
A.2.17. Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?
Yes. However, commits to the database must wait until the tables are
unlocked. Bugzilla databases are typically very small, and backups
routinely take less than a minute.
A.2.18. What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to
install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of skills does
the person need to have? I need to find out if we were to go with
Bugzilla, what types of individuals would we need to hire and how much
would that cost vs buying an "Out-of-the-Box" solution.
If Bugzilla is set up correctly from the start, continuing maintenance
needs are minimal and can be done easily using the web interface.
Commercial Bug-tracking software typically costs somewhere upwards of
$20,000 or more for 5-10 floating licenses. Bugzilla consultation is
available from skilled members of the newsgroup. Simple questions are
answered there and then.
A.2.19. What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire people
to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this something that takes
hours or weeks to install and a couple of hours per week to maintain
and customize or is this a multi-week install process, plus a full
time job for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
It all depends on your level of commitment. Someone with much Bugzilla
experience can get you up and running in less than a day, and your
Bugzilla install can run untended for years. If your Bugzilla strategy
is critical to your business workflow, hire somebody with reasonable
UNIX or Perl skills to handle your process management and bug-tracking
maintenance & customization.
A.2.20. Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using Bugzilla?
Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies needed as identified
above?
No. MySQL asks, if you find their product valuable, that you purchase
a support contract from them that suits your needs.
3. Bugzilla Security
A.3.1. How do I completely disable MySQL security if it's giving me
problems (I've followed the instructions in the installation section
of this guide)?
Run MySQL like this: "mysqld --skip-grant-tables". Please remember
this makes MySQL as secure as taping a $100 to the floor of a football
stadium bathroom for safekeeping.
A.3.2. Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?
The Bugzilla code has undergone a reasonably complete security audit,
and user-facing CGIs run under Perl's taint mode. However, it is
recommended that you closely examine permissions on your Bugzilla
installation, and follow the recommended security guidelines found in
The Bugzilla Guide.
A.3.3. I've implemented the security fixes mentioned in Chris Yeh's
security advisory of 5/10/2000 advising not to run MySQL as root, and
am running into problems with MySQL no longer working correctly.
This is a common problem, related to running out of file descriptors.
Simply add "ulimit -n unlimited" to the script which starts mysqld.
4. Bugzilla Email
A.4.1. I have a user who doesn't want to receive any more email from
Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this user?
The user should be able to set this in user email preferences (uncheck
all boxes) or you can add their email address to the data/nomail file.
A.4.2. I'm evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don't want it to send
email to anyone but me. How do I do it?
Edit the "newchangedmail" Param. Replace "To:" with "X-Real-To:",
replace "Cc:" with "X-Real-CC:", and add a "To: ".
A.4.3. I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something more, or other
than, only new bugs. How do I do it?
Try Klaas Freitag's excellent patch for "whineatassigned"
functionality. You can find it at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6679. This patch is
against an older version of Bugzilla, so you must apply the diffs
manually.
A.4.4. I don't like/want to use Procmail to hand mail off to
bug_email.pl. What alternatives do I have?
You can call bug_email.pl directly from your aliases file, with an
entry like this:
bugzilla-daemon: "|/usr/local/bin/bugzilla/contrib/bug_email.pl"
However, this is fairly nasty and subject to problems; you also need
to set up your smrsh (sendmail restricted shell) to allow it. In a
pinch, though, it can work.
A.4.5. How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs via
email?
You can find an updated README.mailif file in the contrib/ directory
of your Bugzilla distribution that walks you through the setup.
A.4.6. Email takes FOREVER to reach me from Bugzilla -- it's extremely
slow. What gives?
If you are using an alternate Mail Transport Agent (MTA other than
sendmail), make sure the options given in the "processmail" and other
scripts for all instances of "sendmail" are correct for your MTA.
If you are using Sendmail, try enabling "sendmailnow" in
editparams.cgi. If you are using Postfix, you will also need to enable
"sendmailnow".
A.4.7. How come email from Bugzilla changes never reaches me?
Double-check that you have not turned off email in your user
preferences. Confirm that Bugzilla is able to send email by visiting
the "Log In" link of your Bugzilla installation and clicking the
"Email me a password" button after entering your email address.
If you never receive mail from Bugzilla, chances you do not have
sendmail in "/usr/lib/sendmail". Ensure sendmail lives in, or is
symlinked to, "/usr/lib/sendmail".
5. Bugzilla Database
A.5.1. I've heard Bugzilla can be used with Oracle?
Red Hat's old version of Bugzilla (based on 2.8) worked on Oracle. Red
Hat's newer version (based on 2.17.1 and soon to be merged into the
main distribution) runs on PostgreSQL. At this time we know of no
recent ports of Bugzilla to Oracle but do intend to support it in the
future (possibly the 2.20 time-frame).
A.5.2. I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid
entries. What do I do?
Run the "sanity check" utility (./sanitycheck.cgi in the Bugzilla_home
directory) from your web browser to see! If it finishes without
errors, you're probably OK. If it doesn't come back OK (i.e. any red
letters), there are certain things Bugzilla can recover from and
certain things it can't. If it can't auto-recover, I hope you're
familiar with mysqladmin commands or have installed another way to
manage your database. Sanity Check, although it is a good basic check
on your database integrity, by no means is a substitute for competent
database administration and avoiding deletion of data. It is not
exhaustive, and was created to do a basic check for the most common
problems in Bugzilla databases.
A.5.3. I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?
There is no facility in Bugzilla itself to do this. It's also
generally not a smart thing to do if you don't know exactly what
you're doing. However, if you understand SQL you can use the mysql
command line utility to manually insert, delete and modify table
information. There are also more intuitive GUI clients available.
Personal favorites of the Bugzilla team are phpMyAdmin and MySQL
Control Center.
A.5.4. I think I've set up MySQL permissions correctly, but Bugzilla
still can't connect.
Try running MySQL from its binary: "mysqld --skip-grant-tables". This
will allow you to completely rule out grant tables as the cause of
your frustration. If this Bugzilla is able to connect at this point
then you need to check that you have granted proper permission to the
user password combo defined in localconfig.
Warning
Running MySQL with this command line option is very insecure and
should only be done when not connected to the external network as a
troubleshooting step.
A.5.5. How do I synchronize bug information among multiple different
Bugzilla databases?
Well, you can synchronize or you can move bugs. Synchronization will
only work one way -- you can create a read-only copy of the database
at one site, and have it regularly updated at intervals from the main
database.
MySQL has some synchronization features builtin to the latest
releases. It would be great if someone looked into the possibilities
there and provided a report to the newsgroup on how to effectively
synchronize two Bugzilla installations.
If you simply need to transfer bugs from one Bugzilla to another,
checkout the "move.pl" script in the Bugzilla distribution.
6. Bugzilla and Win32
A.6.1. What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32
(Win98+/NT/2K)?
Remove Windows. Install Linux. Install Bugzilla. The boss will never
know the difference.
A.6.2. Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?
Not currently. Bundle::Bugzilla enormously simplifies Bugzilla
installation on UNIX systems. If someone can volunteer to create a
suitable PPM bundle for Win32, it would be appreciated.
A.6.3. CGI's are failing with a "something.cgi is not a valid Windows
NT application" error. Why?
Depending on what Web server you are using, you will have to configure
the Web server to treat *.cgi files as CGI scripts. In IIS, you do
this by adding *.cgi to the App Mappings with the \perl.exe %s
%s as the executable.
Microsoft has some advice on this matter, as well:
"Set application mappings. In the ISM, map the extension for the
script file(s) to the executable for the script interpreter. For
example, you might map the extension .py to Python.exe, the
executable for the Python script interpreter. Note For the
ActiveState Perl script interpreter, the extension .pl is
associated with PerlIS.dll by default. If you want to change the
association of .pl to perl.exe, you need to change the application
mapping. In the mapping, you must add two percent (%) characters to
the end of the pathname for perl.exe, as shown in this example:
c:\perl\bin\perl.exe %s %s"
A.6.4. I'm having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being able
to talk to to the database.
Your modules may be outdated or inaccurate. Try:
1. Hitting http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl
2. Download ActivePerl
3. Go to your prompt
4. Type 'ppm'
5. PPM> install DBI DBD-mysql GD
I reckon TimeDate and Data::Dumper come with the activeperl. You can
check the ActiveState site for packages for installation through PPM.
http://www.activestate.com/Packages/
7. Bugzilla Usage
A.7.1. How do I change my user name (email address) in Bugzilla?
New in 2.16 - go to the Account section of the Preferences. You will
be emailed at both addresses for confirmation.
A.7.2. The query page is very confusing. Isn't there a simpler way to
query?
The interface was simplified by a UI designer for 2.16. Further
suggestions for improvement are welcome, but we won't sacrifice power
for simplicity.
A.7.3. I'm confused by the behavior of the "accept" button in the Show
Bug form. Why doesn't it assign the bug to me when I accept it?
The current behavior is acceptable to bugzilla.mozilla.org and most
users. You have your choice of patches to change this behavior,
however.
Add a "and accept bug" radio button
"Accept" button automatically assigns to you
Note that these patches are somewhat dated. You will need to apply
them manually.
A.7.4. I can't upload anything into the database via the "Create
Attachment" link. What am I doing wrong?
The most likely cause is a very old browser or a browser that is
incompatible with file upload via POST. Download the latest Netscape,
Microsoft, or Mozilla browser to handle uploads correctly.
A.7.5. How do I change a keyword in Bugzilla, once some bugs are using
it?
In the Bugzilla administrator UI, edit the keyword and it will let you
replace the old keyword name with a new one. This will cause a problem
with the keyword cache. Run sanitycheck.cgi to fix it.
8. Bugzilla Hacking
A.8.1. What kind of style should I use for templatization?
Gerv and Myk suggest a 2-space indent, with embedded code sections on
their own line, in line with outer tags. Like this:
[% IF foo %]
[% FOREACH x = barney %]
[% x %]
[% END %]
[% END %]
Myk also recommends you turn on PRE_CHOMP in the template
initialization to prevent bloating of HTML with unnecessary
whitespace.
Please note that many have differing opinions on this subject, and the
existing templates in Bugzilla espouse both this and a 4-space style.
Either is acceptable; the above is preferred.
A.8.2. What bugs are in Bugzilla right now?
Try this link to view current bugs or requests for enhancement for
Bugzilla.
You can view bugs marked for 2.18 release here. This list includes
bugs for the 2.18 release that have already been fixed and checked
into CVS. Please consult the Bugzilla Project Page for details on how
to check current sources out of CVS so you can have these bug fixes
early!
A.8.3. How can I change the default priority to a null value? For
instance, have the default priority be "---" instead of "P2"?
This is well-documented here:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49862. Ultimately, it's as
easy as adding the "---" priority field to your localconfig file in
the appropriate area, re-running checksetup.pl, and then changing the
default priority in your browser using "editparams.cgi".
A.8.4. What's the best way to submit patches? What guidelines should I
follow?
1. Enter a bug into bugzilla.mozilla.org for the "Bugzilla" product.
2. Upload your patch as a unified diff (having used "diff -u" against
the current sources checked out of CVS), or new source file by
clicking "Create a new attachment" link on the bug page you've
just created, and include any descriptions of database changes you
may make, into the bug ID you submitted in step #1. Be sure and
click the "Patch" checkbox to indicate the text you are sending is
a patch!
3. Announce your patch and the associated URL
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XXXXXX) for
discussion in the newsgroup (netscape.public.mozilla.webtools).
You'll get a really good, fairly immediate reaction to the
implications of your patch, which will also give us an idea how
well-received the change would be.
4. If it passes muster with minimal modification, the person to whom
the bug is assigned in Bugzilla is responsible for seeing the
patch is checked into CVS.
5. Bask in the glory of the fact that you helped write the most
successful open-source bug-tracking software on the planet :)
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix B. The Bugzilla Database
Note
This document really needs to be updated with more fleshed out
information about primary keys, interrelationships, and maybe some
nifty tables to document dependencies. Any takers?
_________________________________________________________________
B.1. Modifying Your Running System
Bugzilla optimizes database lookups by storing all relatively static
information in the versioncache file, located in the data/
subdirectory under your installation directory.
If you make a change to the structural data in your database (the
versions table for example), or to the "constants" encoded in
defparams.pl, you will need to remove the cached content from the data
directory (by doing a "rm data/versioncache" ), or your changes won't
show up.
versioncache gets automatically regenerated whenever it's more than an
hour old, so Bugzilla will eventually notice your changes by itself,
but generally you want it to notice right away, so that you can test
things.
_________________________________________________________________
B.2. MySQL Bugzilla Database Introduction
This information comes straight from my life. I was forced to learn
how Bugzilla organizes database because of nitpicky requests from
users for tiny changes in wording, rather than having people
re-educate themselves or figure out how to work our procedures around
the tool. It sucks, but it can and will happen to you, so learn how
the schema works and deal with it when it comes.
So, here you are with your brand-new installation of Bugzilla. You've
got MySQL set up, Apache working right, Perl DBI and DBD talking to
the database flawlessly. Maybe you've even entered a few test bugs to
make sure email's working; people seem to be notified of new bugs and
changes, and you can enter and edit bugs to your heart's content.
Perhaps you've gone through the trouble of setting up a gateway for
people to submit bugs to your database via email, have had a few
people test it, and received rave reviews from your beta testers.
What's the next thing you do? Outline a training strategy for your
development team, of course, and bring them up to speed on the new
tool you've labored over for hours.
Your first training session starts off very well! You have a captive
audience which seems enraptured by the efficiency embodied in this
thing called "Bugzilla". You are caught up describing the nifty
features, how people can save favorite queries in the database, set
them up as headers and footers on their pages, customize their
layouts, generate reports, track status with greater efficiency than
ever before, leap tall buildings with a single bound and rescue Jane
from the clutches of Certain Death!
But Certain Death speaks up -- a tiny voice, from the dark corners of
the conference room. "I have a concern," the voice hisses from the
darkness, "about the use of the word 'verified'.
The room, previously filled with happy chatter, lapses into
reverential silence as Certain Death (better known as the Vice
President of Software Engineering) continues. "You see, for two years
we've used the word 'verified' to indicate that a developer or quality
assurance engineer has confirmed that, in fact, a bug is valid. I
don't want to lose two years of training to a new software product.
You need to change the bug status of 'verified' to 'approved' as soon
as possible. To avoid confusion, of course."
Oh no! Terror strikes your heart, as you find yourself mumbling "yes,
yes, I don't think that would be a problem," You review the changes
with Certain Death, and continue to jabber on, "no, it's not too big a
change. I mean, we have the source code, right? You know, 'Use the
Source, Luke' and all that... no problem," All the while you quiver
inside like a beached jellyfish bubbling, burbling, and boiling on a
hot Jamaican sand dune...
Thus begins your adventure into the heart of Bugzilla. You've been
forced to learn about non-portable enum() fields, varchar columns, and
tinyint definitions. The Adventure Awaits You!
_________________________________________________________________
B.2.1. Bugzilla Database Basics
If you were like me, at this point you're totally clueless about the
internals of MySQL, and if it weren't for this executive order from
the Vice President you couldn't care less about the difference between
a "bigint" and a "tinyint" entry in MySQL. I recommend you refer to
the MySQL documentation, available at MySQL.com . Below are the basics
you need to know about the Bugzilla database. Check the chart above
for more details.
1. To connect to your database:
bash# mysql -u root
If this works without asking you for a password, shame on you !
You should have locked your security down like the installation
instructions told you to. You can find details on locking down
your database in the Bugzilla FAQ in this directory (under
"Security"), or more robust security generalities in the MySQL
searchable documentation.
2. You should now be at a prompt that looks like this:
mysql>
At the prompt, if "bugs" is the name you chose in the localconfig
file for your Bugzilla database, type:
mysql use bugs;
_________________________________________________________________
B.2.1.1. Bugzilla Database Tables
Imagine your MySQL database as a series of spreadsheets, and you won't
be too far off. If you use this command:
mysql> show tables from bugs;
you'll be able to see the names of all the "spreadsheets" (tables) in
your database.
From the command issued above, ou should have some output that looks
like this:
+-------------------+
| Tables in bugs |
+-------------------+
| attachments |
| bugs |
| bugs_activity |
| cc |
| components |
| dependencies |
| fielddefs |
| groups |
| keyworddefs |
| keywords |
| logincookies |
| longdescs |
| milestones |
| namedqueries |
| products |
| profiles |
| profiles_activity |
| tokens |
| versions |
| votes |
| watch |
+-------------------+
Here's an overview of what each table does. Most columns in each ta
ble have
descriptive names that make it fairly trivial to figure out their jobs
.
attachments: This table stores all attachments to bugs. It tends to b
e your
largest table, yet also generally has the fewest entries because file
attachments are so (relatively) large.
bugs: This is the core of your system. The bugs table stores most of
the
current information about a bug, with the exception of the info stored
in the
other tables.
bugs_activity: This stores information regarding what changes are mad
e to bugs
when -- a history file.
cc: This tiny table simply stores all the CC information for any bug
which has
any entries in the CC field of the bug. Note that, like most other ta
bles in
Bugzilla, it does not refer to users by their user names, but by their
unique
userid, stored as a primary key in the profiles table.
components: This stores the programs and components (or products and
components, in newer Bugzilla parlance) for Bugzilla. Curiously, the
"program"
(product) field is the full name of the product, rather than some othe
r unique
identifier, like bug_id and user_id are elsewhere in the database.
dependencies: Stores data about those cool dependency trees.
fielddefs: A nifty table that defines other tables. For instance, wh
en you
submit a form that changes the value of "AssignedTo" this table allows
translation to the actual field name "assigned_to" for entry into MySQ
L.
groups: defines bitmasks for groups. A bitmask is a number that can
uniquely
identify group memberships. For instance, say the group that is allow
ed to
tweak parameters is assigned a value of "1", the group that is allowed
to edit
users is assigned a "2", and the group that is allowed to create new g
roups is
assigned the bitmask of "4". By uniquely combining the group bitmasks
(much
like the chmod command in UNIX,) you can identify a user is allowed to
tweak
parameters and create groups, but not edit users, by giving him a bitm
ask of
"5", or a user allowed to edit users and create groups, but not tweak
parameters, by giving him a bitmask of "6" Simple, huh?
If this makes no sense to you, try this at the mysql prompt:
mysql> select * from groups;
You'll see the list, it makes much more sense that way.
keyworddefs: Definitions of keywords to be used
keywords: Unlike what you'd think, this table holds which keywords are
associated with which bug id's.
logincookies: This stores every login cookie ever assigned to you for
every
machine you've ever logged into Bugzilla from. Curiously, it never do
es any
housecleaning -- I see cookies in this file I've not used for months.
However,
since Bugzilla never expires your cookie (for convenience' sake), it m
akes
sense.
longdescs: The meat of bugzilla -- here is where all user comments ar
e stored!
You've only got 2^24 bytes per comment (it's a mediumtext field), so s
peak
sparingly -- that's only the amount of space the Old Testament from th
e Bible
would take (uncompressed, 16 megabytes). Each comment is keyed to the
bug_id to which it's attached, so the order is necessarily chronologic
al, for
comments are played back in the order in which they are received.
milestones: Interesting that milestones are associated with a specifi
c product
in this table, but Bugzilla does not yet support differing milestones
by
product through the standard configuration interfaces.
namedqueries: This is where everybody stores their "custom queries".
Very
cool feature; it beats the tar out of having to bookmark each cool que
ry you
construct.
products: What products you have, whether new bug entries are allowed
for the
product, what milestone you're working toward on that product, votes,
etc. It
will be nice when the components table supports these same features, s
o you
could close a particular component for bug entry without having to clo
se an
entire product...
profiles: Ahh, so you were wondering where your precious user informa
tion was
stored? Here it is! With the passwords in plain text for all to see!
(but
sshh... don't tell your users!)
profiles_activity: Need to know who did what when to who's profile?
This'll
tell you, it's a pretty complete history.
versions: Version information for every product
votes: Who voted for what when
watch: Who (according to userid) is watching who's bugs (according to
their
userid).
===
THE DETAILS
===
Ahh, so you're wondering just what to do with the information above?
At the
mysql prompt, you can view any information about the columns in a tabl
e with
this command (where "table" is the name of the table you wish to view)
:
mysql> show columns from table;
You can also view all the data in a table with this command:
mysql> select * from table;
-- note: this is a very bad idea to do on, for instance, the "bugs"
table if
you have 50,000 bugs. You'll be sitting there a while until you ctrl-
c or
50,000 bugs play across your screen.
You can limit the display from above a little with the command, wher
e
"column" is the name of the column for which you wish to restrict info
rmation:
mysql> select * from table where (column = "some info");
-- or the reverse of this
mysql> select * from table where (column != "some info");
Let's take our example from the introduction, and assume you need to
change
the word "verified" to "approved" in the resolution field. We know fr
om the
above information that the resolution is likely to be stored in the "b
ugs"
table. Note we'll need to change a little perl code as well as this da
tabase
change, but I won't plunge into that in this document. Let's verify th
e
information is stored in the "bugs" table:
mysql> show columns from bugs
(exceedingly long output truncated here)
| bug_status| enum('UNCONFIRMED','NEW','ASSIGNED','REOPENED','RESOLVED
','VERIFIED','CLOSED')||MUL | UNCONFIRMED||
Sorry about that long line. We see from this that the "bug status"
column is
an "enum field", which is a MySQL peculiarity where a string type fiel
d can
only have certain types of entries. While I think this is very cool,
it's not
standard SQL. Anyway, we need to add the possible enum field entry
'APPROVED' by altering the "bugs" table.
mysql> ALTER table bugs CHANGE bug_status bug_status
-> enum("UNCONFIRMED", "NEW", "ASSIGNED", "REOPENED", "RESOLVED",
-> "VERIFIED", "APPROVED", "CLOSED") not null;
(note we can take three lines or more -- whatever you put in befor
e the
semicolon is evaluated as a single expression)
Now if you do this:
mysql> show columns from bugs;
you'll see that the bug_status field has an extra "APPROVED" enum th
at's
available! Cool thing, too, is that this is reflected on your query p
age as
well -- you can query by the new status. But how's it fit into the ex
isting
scheme of things?
Looks like you need to go back and look for instances of the word "v
erified"
in the perl code for Bugzilla -- wherever you find "verified", change
it to
"approved" and you're in business (make sure that's a case-insensitive
search).
Although you can query by the enum field, you can't give something a s
tatus
of "APPROVED" until you make the perl changes. Note that this change
I
mentioned can also be done by editing checksetup.pl, which automates a
lot of
this. But you need to know this stuff anyway, right?
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix C. Useful Patches and Utilities for Bugzilla
Are you looking for a way to put your Bugzilla into overdrive? Catch
some of the niftiest tricks here in this section.
_________________________________________________________________
C.1. Apache mod_rewrite magic
Apache's mod_rewrite module lets you do some truly amazing things with
URL rewriting. Here are a couple of examples of what you can do.
1. Make it so if someone types http://www.foo.com/12345 , Bugzilla
spits back http://www.foo.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12345. Try setting
up your VirtualHost section for Bugzilla with a rule like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/([0-9]+)$ http://foo.bar.com/show_bug.cgi?id=$1 [L,R]
2. There are many, many more things you can do with mod_rewrite.
Please refer to the mod_rewrite documentation at
http://www.apache.org.
_________________________________________________________________
C.2. Command-line Bugzilla Queries
There are a suite of Unix utilities for querying Bugzilla from the
command line. They live in the contrib/cmdline directory. However,
they have not yet been updated to work with 2.16
(post-templatisation.). There are three files - query.conf, buglist
and bugs.
query.conf contains the mapping from options to field names and
comparison types. Quoted option names are "grepped" for, so it should
be easy to edit this file. Comments (#) have no effect; you must make
sure these lines do not contain any quoted "option".
buglist is a shell script which submits a Bugzilla query and writes
the resulting HTML page to stdout. It supports both short options,
(such as "-Afoo" or "-Rbar") and long options (such as
"--assignedto=foo" or "--reporter=bar"). If the first character of an
option is not "-", it is treated as if it were prefixed with
"--default=".
The column list is taken from the COLUMNLIST environment variable.
This is equivalent to the "Change Columns" option when you list bugs
in buglist.cgi. If you have already used Bugzilla, grep for COLUMNLIST
in your cookies file to see your current COLUMNLIST setting.
bugs is a simple shell script which calls buglist and extracts the bug
numbers from the output. Adding the prefix
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=" turns the bug list
into a working link if any bugs are found. Counting bugs is easy. Pipe
the results through sed -e 's/,/ /g' | wc | awk '{printf $2 "\n"}'
Akkana Peck says she has good results piping buglist output through
w3m -T text/html -dump
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix D. Bugzilla Variants and Competitors
I created this section to answer questions about Bugzilla competitors
and variants, then found a wonderful site which covers an awful lot of
what I wanted to discuss. Rather than quote it in its entirety, I'll
simply refer you here: http://linas.org/linux/pm.html
_________________________________________________________________
D.1. Red Hat Bugzilla
Red Hat's old fork of Bugzilla which was based on version 2.8 is now
obsolete. The newest version in use is based on version 2.17.1 and is
in the process of being integrated into the main Bugzilla source tree.
The back-end is modified to work with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL and
they have custom templates to get their desired look and feel, but
other than that it is Bugzilla 2.17.1. Dave Lawrence of Red Hat put
forth a great deal of effort to make sure that the changes he made
could be integrated back into the main tree. Bug 98304 exists to track
this integration.
URL: http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/
This section last updated 24 Dec 2002
_________________________________________________________________
D.2. Loki Bugzilla (Fenris)
Fenris was a fork from Bugzilla made by Loki Games; when Loki went
into receivership, it died. While Loki's other code lives on, its
custodians recommend Bugzilla for future bug-tracker deployments.
This section last updated 27 Jul 2002
_________________________________________________________________
D.3. Issuezilla
Issuezilla was another fork from Bugzilla, made by collab.net and
hosted at tigris.org. It is also dead; the primary focus of
bug-tracking at tigris.org is their Java-based bug-tracker, Scarab.
This section last updated 27 Jul 2002
_________________________________________________________________
D.4. Scarab
Scarab is a new open source bug-tracking system built using Java
Servlet technology. It is currently at version 1.0 beta 13.
URL: http://scarab.tigris.org
This section last updated 18 Jan 2003
_________________________________________________________________
D.5. Perforce SCM
Although Perforce isn't really a bug tracker, it can be used as such
through the "jobs" functionality.
URL: http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technotes/note052.html
This section last updated 27 Jul 2002
_________________________________________________________________
D.6. SourceForge
SourceForge is a way of coordinating geographically distributed free
software and open source projects over the Internet. It has a built-in
bug tracker, but it's not highly thought of.
URL: http://www.sourceforge.net
This section last updated 27 Jul 2002
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.1, March 2000
Copyright (C) 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place,
Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is permitted to copy
and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but
changing it is not allowed.
_________________________________________________________________
0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other
written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone
the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without
modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily,
this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get
credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for
modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative
works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It
complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft
license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free
software, because free software needs free documentation: a free
program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the
software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it
can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or
whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License
principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
_________________________________________________________________
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a
notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed
under the terms of this License. The "Document", below, refers to any
such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is
addressed as "you".
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the
Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with
modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of
the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the
publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall
subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall
directly within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document is
in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain
any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical
connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal,
commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding
them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles
are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice
that says that the Document is released under this License.
The "Cover Texts" are certain short passages of text that are listed,
as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that
the Document is released under this License.
A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy,
represented in a format whose specification is available to the
general public, whose contents can be viewed and edited directly and
straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of
pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available
drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or
for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input
to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file
format whose markup has been designed to thwart or discourage
subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. A copy that is
not "Transparent" is called "Opaque".
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain
ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML
or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple
HTML designed for human modification. Opaque formats include
PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only
by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or
processing tools are not generally available, and the
machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output
purposes only.
The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself,
plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material
this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in
formats which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means
the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title,
preceding the beginning of the body of the text.
_________________________________________________________________
2. VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either
commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the
copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies
to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no
other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use
technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further
copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept
compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough
number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and
you may publicly display copies.
_________________________________________________________________
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than 100,
and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must
enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all
these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and
Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and
legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover
must present the full title with all words of the title equally
prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in
addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they
preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can
be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit
legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit
reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent
pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering
more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent
copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy
a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a complete
Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material, which the
general network-using public has access to download anonymously at no
charge using public-standard network protocols. If you use the latter
option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin
distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this
Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location
until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque
copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to
the public.
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the
Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to
give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the
Document.
_________________________________________________________________
4. MODIFICATIONS
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under
the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release
the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified
Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution
and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy
of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct
from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions
(which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section
of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version
if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or
entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the
Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal
authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has
less than five).
C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified
Version, as the publisher.
D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications
adjacent to the other copyright notices.
F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice
giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the
terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant
Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document's license
notice.
H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and add to
it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If
there is no section entitled "History" in the Document, create one
stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as
given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified
Version as stated in the previous sentence.
J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for
public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise
the network locations given in the Document for previous versions
it was based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You
may omit a network location for a work that was published at least
four years before the Document itself, or if the original
publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",
preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the
substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements
and/or dedications given therein.
L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in
their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent
are not considered part of the section titles.
M. Delete any section entitled "Endorsements". Such a section may not
be included in the Modified Version.
N. Do not retitle any existing section as "Endorsements" or to
conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or
appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material
copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all
of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the
list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's license notice.
These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
You may add a section entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains
nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various
parties--for example, statements of peer review or that the text has
been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a
standard.
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a
passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list
of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of
Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or
through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already
includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or
by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of,
you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit
permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License
give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or
imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
_________________________________________________________________
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
You may combine the Document with other documents released under this
License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified
versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the
Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and
list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its
license notice.
The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and
multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single
copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but
different contents, make the title of each such section unique by
adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original
author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number.
Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of
Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
In the combination, you must combine any sections entitled "History"
in the various original documents, forming one section entitled
"History"; likewise combine any sections entitled "Acknowledgements",
and any sections entitled "Dedications". You must delete all sections
entitled "Endorsements."
_________________________________________________________________
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other
documents released under this License, and replace the individual
copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy
that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules
of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all
other respects.
You may extract a single document from such a collection, and
distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a
copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this
License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that
document.
_________________________________________________________________
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate
and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or
distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version
of the Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the
compilation. Such a compilation is called an "aggregate", and this
License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled
with the Document, on account of their being thus compiled, if they
are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these
copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter
of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on
covers that surround only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise
they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.
_________________________________________________________________
8. TRANSLATION
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may
distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4.
Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special
permission from their copyright holders, but you may include
translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the
original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a
translation of this License provided that you also include the
original English version of this License. In case of a disagreement
between the translation and the original English version of this
License, the original English version will prevail.
_________________________________________________________________
9. TERMINATION
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document
except as expressly provided for under this License. Any other attempt
to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and
will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However,
parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this
License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
_________________________________________________________________
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the
GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions
will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in
detail to address new problems or concerns. See
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ .
Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number.
If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this
License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of
following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or
of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the
Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version
number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not
as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.
_________________________________________________________________
How to use this License for your documents
To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and
license notices just after the title page:
Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. Permission is granted to copy,
distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU
Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant
Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being
LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the
license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation
License".
If you have no Invariant Sections, write "with no Invariant Sections"
instead of saying which ones are invariant. If you have no Front-Cover
Texts, write "no Front-Cover Texts" instead of "Front-Cover Texts
being LIST"; likewise for Back-Cover Texts.
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we
recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of
free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to
permit their use in free software.
Glossary
0-9, high ascii
.htaccess
Apache web server, and other NCSA-compliant web servers,
observe the convention of using files in directories called
.htaccess to restrict access to certain files. In Bugzilla,
they are used to keep secret files which would otherwise
compromise your installation - e.g. the localconfig file
contains the password to your database. curious.
A
Apache
In this context, Apache is the web server most commonly used
for serving up Bugzilla pages. Contrary to popular belief, the
apache web server has nothing to do with the ancient and noble
Native American tribe, but instead derived its name from the
fact that it was "a patchy" version of the original NCSA
world-wide-web server.
Useful Directives when configuring Bugzilla
AddHandler
Tell Apache that it's OK to run CGI scripts.
AllowOverride, Options
These directives are used to tell Apache many things
about the directory they apply to. For Bugzilla's
purposes, we need them to allow script execution and
.htaccess overrides.
DirectoryIndex
Used to tell Apache what files are indexes. If you can
not add index.cgi to the list of valid files, you'll need
to set $index_html to 1 in localconfig so ./checksetup.pl
will create an index.html that redirects to index.cgi.
ScriptInterpreterSource
Used when running Apache on windows so the shebang line
doesn't have to be changed in every Bugzilla script.
For more information about how to configure Apache for
Bugzilla, see Section 4.4.1.
B
Bug
A "bug" in Bugzilla refers to an issue entered into the
database which has an associated number, assignments, comments,
etc. Some also refer to a "tickets" or "issues"; in the context
of Bugzilla, they are synonymous.
Bug Number
Each Bugzilla bug is assigned a number that uniquely identifies
that bug. The bug associated with a bug number can be pulled up
via a query, or easily from the very front page by typing the
number in the "Find" box.
Bugzilla
Bugzilla is the world-leading free software bug tracking
system.
Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
CGI is an acronym for Common Gateway Interface. This is a
standard for interfacing an external application with a web
server. Bugzilla is an example of a CGI application.
Component
A Component is a subsection of a Product. It should be a narrow
category, tailored to your organization. All Products must
contain at least one Component (and, as a matter of fact,
creating a Product with no Components will create an error in
Bugzilla).
CPAN
CPAN stands for the "Comprehensive Perl Archive Network". CPAN
maintains a large number of extremely useful Perl modules -
encapsulated chunks of code for performing a particular task.
D
daemon
A daemon is a computer program which runs in the background. In
general, most daemons are started at boot time via System V
init scripts, or through RC scripts on BSD-based systems.
mysqld, the MySQL server, and apache, a web server, are
generally run as daemons.
G
Groups
The word "Groups" has a very special meaning to Bugzilla.
Bugzilla's main security mechanism comes by placing users in
groups, and assigning those groups certain privileges to view
bugs in particular Products in the Bugzilla database.
J
JavaScript
JavaScript is cool, we should talk about it.
M
mysqld
mysqld is the name of the daemon for the MySQL database. In
general, it is invoked automatically through the use of the
System V init scripts on GNU/Linux and AT&T System V-based
systems, such as Solaris and HP/UX, or through the RC scripts
on BSD-based systems.
P
Product
A Product is a broad category of types of bugs, normally
representing a single piece of software or entity. In general,
there are several Components to a Product. A Product may define
a group (used for security) for all bugs entered into its
Components.
Perl
First written by Larry Wall, Perl is a remarkable program
language. It has the benefits of the flexibility of an
interpreted scripting language (such as shell script), combined
with the speed and power of a compiled language, such as C.
Bugzilla is maintained in Perl.
Q
QA
"QA", "Q/A", and "Q.A." are short for "Quality Assurance". In
most large software development organizations, there is a team
devoted to ensuring the product meets minimum standards before
shipping. This team will also generally want to track the
progress of bugs over their life cycle, thus the need for the
"QA Contact" field in a bug.
S
SGML
SGML stands for "Standard Generalized Markup Language". Created
in the 1980's to provide an extensible means to maintain
documentation based upon content instead of presentation, SGML
has withstood the test of time as a robust, powerful language.
XML is the "baby brother" of SGML; any valid XML document it,
by definition, a valid SGML document. The document you are
reading is written and maintained in SGML, and is also valid
XML if you modify the Document Type Definition.
T
Target Milestone
Target Milestones are Product goals. They are configurable on a
per-Product basis. Most software development houses have a
concept of "milestones" where the people funding a project
expect certain functionality on certain dates. Bugzilla
facilitates meeting these milestones by giving you the ability
to declare by which milestone a bug will be fixed, or an
enhancement will be implemented.
Tool Command Language (TCL)
TCL is an open source scripting language available for Windows,
Macintosh, and Unix based systems. Bugzilla 1.0 was written in
TCL but never released. The first release of Bugzilla was 2.0,
which was when it was ported to perl.
Z
Zarro Boogs Found
This is the cryptic response sent by Bugzilla when a query
returned no results. It is just a goofy way of saying "Zero
Bugs Found".