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. checklist 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. 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/. usebuggroups: This dictates whether or not to implement group-based security for Bugzilla. If set, Bugzilla bugs can have an associated 'group', defining which users are allowed to see and edit the bug. Set "usebuggroups" to "on" only if you may wish to restrict access to particular bugs to certain groups of users. I suggest leaving this parameter off while initially testing your Bugzilla. usebuggroupsentry: 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 places all newly-created bugs in the group for their product immediately. 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. 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. Set "shadowdb" to e.g. "bug_shadowdb" if you will be running a *very* large installation of Bugzilla. Enabling "shadowdb" can adversely affect the stability of your installation of Bugzilla. You should regularly check that your database is in sync. It is often advisable to force a shadow database sync nightly via cron. If you use the "shadowdb" option, it is only natural that you should turn the "queryagainstshadowdb" option on as well. Otherwise you are replicating data into a shadow database for no reason! 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. :-) 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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!) 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.

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. If you wish to add more administrative users, you must use the MySQL interface. Run "mysql" from the command line, and use these commands: mysql> use bugs; mysql> update profiles set groupset=0x7ffffffffffffff where login_name = "(user's login name)"; Yes, that is fourteen f 's. A whole lot of f-ing going on if you want to create a new administator.

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. After logging in, click the "Users" link at the footer of the query page, and then click "Add a new user". Fill out the form presented. This page is self-explanatory. When done, click "Submit". 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.

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. Don't disable the administrator account! 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. <groupname>: 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.) <productname>: 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.

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: Select "products" from the footer Select the "Add" link in the bottom right 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.

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: Select the "Edit components" link from the "Edit product" page Select the "Add" link in the bottom right. 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.

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: From the "Edit product" screen, select "Edit Versions" You will notice that the product already has the default version "undefined". Click the "Add" link in the bottom right. Enter the name of the Version. This field takes text only. Then click the "Add" button.

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. 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: Select "Edit milestones" from the "Edit product" page. Select "Add" in the bottom right corner. text 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". From the Edit product screen, you can enter the URL of a page which gives information about your milestones and what they mean. 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.

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: Navigate to the "Edit product" screen for the Product you wish to modify Maximum Votes per person: Setting this field to "0" disables voting. 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. 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. Once you have adjusted the values to your preference, click "Update".

Groups allow the administrator to isolate bugs or products that should only be seen by certain people. There are two types of group - Generic Groups, and Product-Based Groups. Product-Based Groups are matched with products, and allow you to restrict access to bugs on a per-product basis. They are enabled using the usebuggroups Param. Turning on the usebuggroupsentry Param will mean bugs automatically get added to their product group when filed. Generic Groups have no special relationship to products; you create them, and put bugs in them as required. One example of the use of Generic Groups is Mozilla's "Security" group, into which security-sensitive bugs are placed until fixed. Only the Mozilla Security Team are members of this group. To create Generic Groups: Select the "groups" link in the footer. Take a moment to understand the instructions on the "Edit Groups" screen, then select the "Add Group" link. Fill out the "New Name", "New Description", and "New User RegExp" fields. "New User RegExp" allows you to automatically place all users who fulfill the Regular Expression into the new group. When you have finished, click "Add". To use Product-Based Groups: Turn on "usebuggroups" and "usebuggroupsentry" in the "Edit Parameters" screen. XXX is this still true? "usebuggroupsentry" has the capacity to prevent the administrative user from directly altering bugs because of conflicting group permissions. If you plan on using "usebuggroupsentry", you should plan on restricting administrative account usage to administrative duties only. In other words, manage bugs with an unpriveleged user account, and manage users, groups, Products, etc. with the administrative account. In future, when you create a Product, a matching group will be automatically created. If you need to add a Product Group to a Product which was created before you turned on usebuggroups, then simply create a new group, as outlined above, with the same name as the Product. Bugzilla currently has a limit of 64 groups per installation. If you have more than about 50 products, you should consider running multiple Bugzillas. Ask in the newsgroup for other suggestions for working around this restriction. 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.

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. 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: Ensure you are running at least MysQL version 3.22.32 or newer. Earlier versions had notable security holes and (from a security point of view) poor default configuration choices. There is no substitute for understanding the tools on your system! Read The MySQL Privilege System until you can recite it from memory! 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 Bug 57161 for the localconfig file, and Bug 65572 for adequate protection in your data/ directory. 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. Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess", readable by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/data directory. <Files comments> allow from all </Files> deny from all Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess", readable by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/ directory. <Files localconfig> deny from all </Files> allow from all

One of the large changes for 2.16 was the templatisation 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. Templatisation also makes localised versions of Bugzilla possible, for the first time. In the future, a Bugzilla installation may have templates installed for multiple localisations, and select which ones to use based on the user's browser language setting.

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 localisation. 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 customisations 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. Don't directly edit the compiled templates in data/template/* - your changes will be lost when Template Toolkit recompiles them.

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 &lt;. 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. 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.

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 <stubname>-<formatname>.<contenttypetag>.tmpl. Try out the template by calling the CGI as <cginame>.cgi?format=<formatname> .

There are a few templates you may be particularly interested in customising 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 customise 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/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-<formatname>.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 <input type="text" name="buildid" size="30"> and then your comment.txt.tmpl had BuildID: [% form.buildid %] then BuildID: 20020303 would appear in the initial checkin comment.

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, customising 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 customisations 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 organisation, ask in the newsgroup.

A plain Bugzilla is fairly easy to upgrade from one version to a newer one. Always read the release notes to see if there are any issues that you might need to take note of. It is recommended that you take a backup of your database and your entire Bugzilla installation before attempting an upgrade. You can upgrade a 'clean' installation by untarring a new tarball over the old installation. If you are upgrading from 2.12 or later, and have cvs installed, you can type cvs -z3 update, and resolve conflicts if there are any. However, things get a bit more complicated if you've made changes to Bugzilla's code. In this case, you may have to re-make or reapply those changes. One good method is to take a diff of your customised version against the original, so you can survey all that you've changed. Hopefully, templatisation will reduce the need for this in the future. From version 2.8 onwards, Bugzilla databases can be automatically carried forward during an upgrade. However, because the developers of Bugzilla are constantly adding new tables, columns and fields, you'll probably get SQL errors if you just update the code and attempt to use Bugzilla. Always run the checksetup.pl script whenever you upgrade your installation. If you are running Bugzilla version 2.8 or lower, and wish to upgrade to the latest version, please consult the file, "UPGRADING-pre-2.8" in the Bugzilla root directory after untarring the archive.

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