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><A
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>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.
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
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><LI
><P
> integrated, product-based granular security schema
</P
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><LI
><P
> inter-bug dependencies and dependency graphing
</P
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> advanced reporting capabilities
</P
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> a robust, stable RDBMS back-end
</P
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> extensive configurability
</P
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> a very well-understood and well-thought-out natural bug resolution protocol
</P
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> email, XML, and HTTP APIs
</P
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> available integration with automated software configuration management systems, including
Perforce and CVS.
</P
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><P
> too many more features to list
</P
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></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
> Some recent headway has been made on the query front, however. If you are using the latest
version of Bugzilla, you should see a "simple search" 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 a long-awaited overhaul in the form
of Bugzilla 3.0 is expected sometime later this year.
</P
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