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, not all of the Bugzilla installations there will necessarily have all Bugzilla features enabled, and different installations run different versions, so some things may not quite work as this document describes.

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: . Click the Open a new Bugzilla account link, enter your email address and, optionally, your name in the spaces provided, then click Create Account . Within moments, you should receive an email to the address you provided, which contains your login name (generally the same as the email address), and a password. This password is randomly generated, but can be changed to something more memorable. Click the Log In link in the footer 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 to remember you are logged in so, unless you have cookies disabled or your IP address changes, you should not have to log in again.

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. 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. 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. Assigned To: The person responsible for fixing the bug. *URL: A URL associated with the bug, if any. Summary: A one-sentence summary of the problem. *Status Whiteboard: (a.k.a. Whiteboard) A free-form text area for adding short notes and tags to a bug. *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. Platform and OS: These indicate the computing environment where the bug was found. 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. 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. 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. *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. Reporter: The person who filed the bug. CC list: A list of people who get mail when the bug changes. Attachments: You can attach files (e.g. testcases or patches) to bugs. If there are any attachments, they are listed in this section. *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. *Votes: Whether this bug has any votes. Additional Comments: You can add your two cents to the bug discussion here, if you have something worthwhile to say.

The life cycle, also known as work flow, of a bug is currently hardcoded into Bugzilla. contains a graphical repsentation of this life cycle. If you wish to customize this image for your site, the diagram file is available in Dia's native XML format.

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: . The Search page has controls for selecting different possible values for all of the fields in a bug, as described above. For some fields, multiple values can be selected. In those cases, Bugzilla returns bugs where the content of the field matches any one of the selected values. If none is selected, then the field can take any value. Once you've run a search, you can save it as a Saved Search, which appears in the page footer. Highly advanced querying is done using Boolean Charts. See the Boolean Charts help link on the Search page for more information.

If you run a search, a list of matching bugs will be returned. 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. CSV: get the buglist as comma-separated values, for import into e.g. a spreadsheet. 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 Search: 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. Remember Search As: You can give a search a name and remember it; a link will appear in your page footer giving you quick access to run it again later.

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: Go to Landfill in your browser and click Enter a new bug report. Select a product - any one will do. 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. Select "Commit" and send in your bug report. 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.

Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to lack of context, improper format and the inherent readability issues that raw patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed to fix that by offering increased context, linking to sections, and integrating with Bonsai, LXR and CVS. Patch viewer allows you to: View patches in color, with side-by-side view rather than trying to interpret the contents of the patch. See the difference between two patches. Get more context in a patch. Collapse and expand sections of a patch for easy reading. Link to a particular section of a patch for discussion or review Go to Bonsai or LXR to see more context, blame, and cross-references for the part of the patch you are looking at Create a rawtext unified format diff out of any patch, no matter what format it came from

The main way to view a patch in patch viewer is to click on the "Diff" link next to a patch in the Attachments list on a bug. You may also do this within the edit window by clicking the "View Attachment As Diff" button in the Edit Attachment screen.

To see the difference between two patches, you must first view the newer patch in Patch Viewer. Then select the older patch from the dropdown at the top of the page ("Differences between [dropdown] and this patch") and click the "Diff" button. This will show you what is new or changed in the newer patch.

To get more context in a patch, you put a number in the textbox at the top of Patch Viewer ("Patch / File / [textbox]") and hit enter. This will give you that many lines of context before and after each change. Alternatively, you can click on the "File" link there and it will show each change in the full context of the file. This feature only works against files that were diffed using "cvs diff".

To view only a certain set of files in a patch (for example, if a patch is absolutely huge and you want to only review part of it at a time), you can click the "(+)" and "(-)" links next to each file (to expand it or collapse it). If you want to collapse all files or expand all files, you can click the "Collapse All" and "Expand All" links at the top of the page.

To link to a section of a patch (for example, if you want to be able to give someone a URL to show them which part you are talking about) you simply click the "Link Here" link on the section header. The resulting URL can be copied and used in discussion. (Copy Link Location in Mozilla works as well.)

To go to Bonsai to get blame for the lines you are interested in, you can click the "Lines XX-YY" link on the section header you are interested in. This works even if the patch is against an old version of the file, since Bonsai stores all versions of the file. To go to LXR, you click on the filename on the file header (unfortunately, since LXR only does the most recent version, line numbers are likely to rot).

If the patch is not in a format that you like, you can turn it into a unified diff format by clicking the "Raw Unified" link at the top of the page.

This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices that have been developed.

Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text. 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 a link: . Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are: bug 12345 comment 7 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.

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.

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, if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style four line ASCII art creations are not.

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. Bugzilla stores and uses a Content-Type for each attachment (e.g. text/html). To download an attachment as a different Content-Type (e.g. application/xhtml+xml), you can override this using a 'content-type' parameter on the URL, e.g. &content-type=text/plain.

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 three tabs:

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.

This tab controls the amount of email Bugzilla sends you. The first item on this page is marked Users to watch. When you enter one or more comma-delineated user accounts (usually email addresses) into the text entry box, you will receive a copy of all the bugmail those users are sent (security settings permitting). This powerful functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change projects or users go on holiday. The ability to watch other users may not be available in all Bugzilla installations. If you don't see this feature, and feel that you need it, speak to your administrator. In general, users have almost complete control over how much (or how little) email Bugzilla sends them. If you want to receive the maximum amount of email possible, click the Enable All Mail button. If you don't want to receive any email from Bugzilla at all, click the Disable All Mail button. Your Bugzilla administrator can stop a user from receiving bugmail by adding the user's name to the data/nomail file. This is a drastic step best taken only for disabled accounts, as it overrides the the user's individual mail preferences. If you'd like to set your bugmail to something besides 'Completely ON' and 'Completely OFF', the Field/recipient specific options table allows you to do just that. The rows of the table define events that can happen to a bug -- things like attachments being added, new comments being made, the priority changing, etc. The columns in the table define your relationship with the bug: Reporter - Where you are the person who initially reported the bug. Your name/account appears in the Reporter: field. Assignee - Where you are the person who has been designated as the one responsible for the bug. Your name/account appears in the Assigned To: field of the bug. QA Contact - You are one of the designated QA Contacts for the bug. Your account appears in the QA Contact: text-box of the bug. CC - You are on the list CC List for the bug. Your account appears in the CC: text box of the bug. Voter - You have placed one or more votes for the bug. Your account appears only if someone clicks on the Show votes for this bug link on the bug. Some columns may not be visible for your installation, depending on your site's configuration. To fine-tune your bugmail, decide the events for which you want to receive bugmail; then decide if you want to receive it all the time (enable the checkbox for every column), or only when you have a certain relationship with a bug (enable the checkbox only for those columns). For example: if you didn't want to receive mail when someone added themselves to the CC list, you could uncheck all the boxes in the CC Field Changes line. As another example, if you never wanted to receive email on bugs you reported unless the bug was resolved, you would un-check all boxes in the Reporter column except for the one on the The bug is resolved or verified row. Bugzilla adds the X-Bugzilla-Reason header to all bugmail it sends, describing the recipient's relationship (AssignedTo, Reporter, QAContact, CC, or Voter) to the bug. This header can be used to do further client-side filtering. Two items not in the table (Email me when someone asks me to set a flag and Email me when someone sets a flag I asked for) define how you want to receive bugmail with regards to flags. Their use is quite straightforward; enable the checkboxes if you want Bugzilla to send you mail under either of the above conditions. By default, Bugzilla sends out email regardless of who made the change... even if you were the one responsible for generating the email in the first place. If you don't care to receive bugmail from your own changes, check the box marked Only email me reports of changes made by other people.

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.

As well as the standard buglist, Bugzilla has two more ways of viewing sets of bugs. These are the reports (which give different views of the current state of the database) and charts (which plot the changes in particular sets of bugs over time.)

A report is a view of the current state of the bug database. You can run either an HTML-table-based report, or a graphical line/pie/bar-chart-based one. The two have different pages to define them, but are close cousins - once you've defined and viewed a report, you can switch between any of the different views of the data at will. Both report types are based on the idea of defining a set of bugs using the standard search interface, and then choosing some aspect of that set to plot on the horizontal and/or vertical axes. You can also get a form of 3-dimensional report by choosing to have multiple images or tables. So, for example, you could use the search form to choose "all bugs in the WorldControl product", and then plot their severity against their component to see which component had had the largest number of bad bugs reported against it. Once you've defined your parameters and hit "Generate Report", you can switch between HTML, CSV, Bar, Line and Pie. (Note: Pie is only available if you didn't define a vertical axis, as pie charts don't have one.) The other controls are fairly self-explanatory; you can change the size of the image if you find text is overwriting other text, or the bars are too thin to see.

A chart is a view of the state of the bug database over time. Bugzilla currently has two charting systems - Old Charts and New Charts. Old Charts have been part of Bugzilla for a long time; they chart each status and resolution for each product, and that's all. They are deprecated, and going away soon - we won't say any more about them. New Charts are the future - they allow you to chart anything you can define as a search. Both charting forms require the administrator to set up the data-gathering script. If you can't see any charts, ask them whether they have done so. An individual line on a chart is called a data set. All data sets are organised into categories and subcategories. The data sets that Bugzilla defines automatically use the Product name as a Category and Component names as Subcategories, but there is no need for you to follow that naming scheme with your own charts if you don't want to. Data sets may be public or private. Everyone sees public data sets in the list, but only their creator sees private data sets. Only administrators can make data sets public. No two data sets, even two private ones, can have the same set of category, subcategory and name. So if you are creating private data sets, one idea is to have the Category be your username.

You create a chart by selecting a number of data sets from the list, and pressing Add To List for each. In the List Of Data Sets To Plot, you can define the label that data set will have in the chart's legend, and also ask Bugzilla to Sum a number of data sets (e.g. you could Sum data sets representing RESOLVED, VERIFIED and CLOSED in a particular product to get a data set representing all the resolved bugs in that product.) If you've erroneously added a data set to the list, select it using the checkbox and click Remove. Once you add more than one data set, a "Grand Total" line automatically appears at the bottom of the list. If you don't want this, simply remove it as you would remove any other line. You may also choose to plot only over a certain date range, and to cumulate the results - that is, to plot each one using the previous one as a baseline, so the top line gives a sum of all the data sets. It's easier to try than to explain :-) Once a data set is in the list, one can also perform certain actions on it. For example, one can edit the data set's parameters (name, frequency etc.) if it's one you created or if you are an administrator. Once you are happy, click Chart This List to see the chart.

You may also create new data sets of your own. To do this, click the "create a new data set" link on the Create Chart page. This takes you to a search-like interface where you can define the search that Bugzilla will plot. At the bottom of the page, you choose the category, sub-category and name of your new data set. If you have sufficient permissions, you can make the data set public, and reduce the frequency of data collection to less than the default seven days.

A flag is a kind of status that can be set on bugs or attachments to indicate that the bugs/attachments are in a certain state. Each installation can define its own set of flags that can be set on bugs or attachments. If your installation has defined a flag, you can set or unset that flag, and if your administrator has enabled requesting of flags, you can submit a request for another user to set the flag. To set a flag, select either "+" or "-" from the drop-down menu next to the name of the flag in the "Flags" list. The meaning of these values are flag-specific and thus cannot be described in this documentation, but by way of example, setting a flag named "review" to "+" may indicate that the bug/attachment has passed review, while setting it to "-" may indicate that the bug/attachment has failed review. To unset a flag, click its drop-down menu and select the blank value. If your administrator has enabled requests for a flag, request a flag by selecting "?" from the drop-down menu and then entering the username of the user you want to set the flag in the text field next to the menu. A set flag appears in bug reports and on "edit attachment" pages with the abbreviated username of the user who set the flag prepended to the flag name. For example, if Jack sets a "review" flag to "+", it appears as Jack: review [ + ] A requested flag appears with the user who requested the flag prepended to the flag name and the user who has been requested to set the flag appended to the flag name within parentheses. For example, if Jack asks Jill for review, it appears as Jack: review [ ? ] (Jill).