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<HTML
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>What is Bugzilla?</TITLE
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><H1
CLASS="SECTION"
><A
NAME="WHATIS"
>4.1. What is Bugzilla?</A
></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.
At the time Bugzilla was originally written, as a port from Netscape Communications'
"Bugsplat!" program to Perl from TCL, there were very few competitors in the market
for bug-tracking software. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the
time charged enormous licensing fees. Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the
open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla) and
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, and HTTP APIs
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> integration with several automated software configuration management systems
</P
></LI
><LI
><P
> too many more features to list
</P
></LI
></UL
>
</P
><P
> Despite its current robustness and popularity, however, 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,
no internationalization, and dependence on some nonstandard libraries.
</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 a long-awaited overhaul in the form
of Bugzilla 3.0 is expected sometime later this year.
</P
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