About This Guide
Purpose and Scope of this Guide This document was started on September 17, 2000 by Matthew P. Barnson after a great deal of procrastination updating the Bugzilla FAQ, which I left untouched for nearly half a year. After numerous complete rewrites and reformatting, it is the document you see today. Despite the lack of updates, Bugzilla is simply the best piece of bug-tracking software the world has ever seen. This document is intended to be the comprehensive guide to the installation, administration, maintenance, and use of the Bugzilla bug-tracking system. This release of the Bugzilla Guide is the &bzg-ver; release. It is so named that it may match the current version of Bugzilla. The numbering tradition stems from that used for many free software projects, in which even-numbered point releases (1.2, 1.14, etc.) are considered "stable releases", intended for public consumption; on the other hand, odd-numbered point releases (1.3, 2.09, etc.) are considered unstable development releases intended for advanced users, systems administrators, developers, and those who enjoy a lot of pain. Newer revisions of the Bugzilla Guide follow the numbering conventions of the main-tree Bugzilla releases, available at &bz;. Intermediate releases will have a minor revision number following a period. The current version of Bugzilla, as of this writing (&bzg-date;) is &bz-ver;; if something were seriously wrong with that edition of the Guide, subsequent releases would receive an additional dotted-decimal digit to indicate the update (&bzg-ver;.1, &bzg-ver;.2, etc.). Got it? Good. I wrote this in response to the enormous demand for decent Bugzilla documentation. I have incorporated instructions from the Bugzilla README, Frequently Asked Questions, Database Schema Document, and various mailing lists to create it. Chances are, there are glaring errors in this documentation; please contact &bzg-auth-email; to correct them.
Disclaimer No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted. Use the concepts, examples, and other content at your own risk. As this is a new edition of this document, there may be errors and inaccuracies that may damage your system. Use of this document may cause your girlfriend to leave you, your cats to pee on your furniture and clothing, your computer to cease functioning, your boss to fire you, 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". I 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. Heaven knows it's saved my bacon time after time; 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 insure your security needs are met.
New Versions This is the &bzg-ver; version of The Bugzilla Guide. 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. This document can be found in the following places: TriloBYTE Mozilla.org The Linux Documentation Project The latest version of this document can be checked out via CVS. Please follow the instructions available at the Mozilla CVS page, and check out the mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/docs/ branch.
Credits The people listed below have made enormous contributions to the creation of this Guide, through their dedicated hacking efforts, numerous e-mail and IRC support sessions, and overall excellent contribution to the Bugzilla community: Terry Weissman for initially converting Bugzilla from BugSplat! and writing the README upon which this 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.
Contributors Thanks go to these people for significant contributions to this documentation (in no particular order): Andrew Pearson, Spencer Smith, Eric Hanson, Kevin Brannen, Ron Teitelbaum
Feedback I welcome feedback on this document. Without your submissions and input, this Guide cannot continue to exist. Please mail additions, comments, criticisms, etc. to barnboy@trilobyte.net. Please send flames to devnull@localhost
Translations The Bugzilla Guide needs translators! Please volunteer your translation into the language of your choice. If you will translate this Guide, please notify the members of the mozilla-webtools mailing list at mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org, and arrange with Matt Barnson to check it into CVS.
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