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<HTML
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>What is Bugzilla?</TITLE
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><H1
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><A
NAME="whatis">2.1. What is Bugzilla?</H1
><P
> Bugzilla is one example of a class of programs called "Defect
Tracking Systems", or, more commonly, "Bug-Tracking Systems". Defect
Tracking Systems allow individual or groups of developers to keep
track of outstanding bugs in their product effectively. Bugzilla was
originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called
"TCL", to replace a crappy bug-tracking database used internally for
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.
</P
><P
> Bugzilla has matured immensely, and now boasts many advanced features. These include:
<P
></P
><UL
><LI
><P
> integrated, product-based granular security schema
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> inter-bug dependencies and dependency graphing
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> advanced reporting capabilities
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> a robust, stable RDBMS back-end
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> extensive configurability
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> a very well-understood and well-thought-out natural bug resolution protocol
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> email, XML, console, and HTTP APIs
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> available integration with automated software
configuration management systems, including Perforce and
CVS (through the Bugzilla email interface and
checkin/checkout scripts)
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> too many more features to list
</P
></LI
></UL
>
</P
><P
> Despite its current robustness and popularity, Bugzilla faces
some near-term challenges, such as reliance on a single
database, a lack of abstraction of the user interface and
program logic, verbose email bug notifications, a powerful but
daunting query interface, little reporting configurability,
problems with extremely large queries, some unsupportable bug
resolution options, little internationalization (although non-US
character sets are accepted for comments), and dependence on
some nonstandard libraries.
</P
><P
> Some recent headway has been made on the query front, however.
If you are using the latest version of Bugzilla, you should see
a <SPAN
CLASS="QUOTE"
>"simple search"</SPAN
> form on the default front page of
your Bugzilla install. Type in two or three search terms and
you should pull up some relevant information. This is also
available as "queryhelp.cgi".
</P
><P
> Despite these small problems, Bugzilla is very hard to beat. It
is under <EM
>very</EM
> active development to address
the current issues, and continually gains new features.
</P
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