<!-- <!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.1//EN" [
<!ENTITY conventions SYSTEM "conventions.sgml"> ] > -->
<chapter id="about">
<title>About This Guide</title>
<section id="aboutthisguide">
<title>Purpose and Scope of this Guide</title>
<para>
This document was started on September 17, 2000 by Matthew P.
Barnson after a great deal of procrastination updating the
Bugzilla FAQ, which I left untouched for nearly half a year.
After numerous complete rewrites and reformatting, it is the
document you see today.
</para>
<para>
Bugzilla is simply the best piece of bug-tracking software the
world has ever seen. This document is intended to be the
comprehensive guide to the installation, administration,
maintenance, and use of the Bugzilla bug-tracking system.
</para>
<para>
This release of the Bugzilla Guide is the
<emphasis>&bzg-ver;</emphasis> release. It is so named that it
may match the current version of Bugzilla. The numbering
tradition stems from that used for many free software projects,
in which <emphasis>even-numbered</emphasis> point releases (1.2,
1.14, etc.) are considered "stable releases", intended for
public consumption; on the other hand,
<emphasis>odd-numbered</emphasis> point releases (1.3, 2.09,
etc.) are considered unstable <emphasis>development</emphasis>
releases intended for advanced users, systems administrators,
developers, and those who enjoy a lot of pain.
</para>
<para>
Newer revisions of the Bugzilla Guide follow the numbering
conventions of the main-tree Bugzilla releases, available at
<ulink url="&bz;">&bz;</ulink>. Intermediate releases will have
a minor revision number following a period. The current version
of Bugzilla, as of this writing (&bzg-date;) is &bz-ver;; if
something were seriously wrong with that edition of the Guide,
subsequent releases would receive an additional dotted-decimal
digit to indicate the update (&bzg-ver;.1, &bzg-ver;.2, etc.).
Got it? Good.
</para>
<para>
I wrote this in response to the enormous demand for decent
Bugzilla documentation. I have incorporated instructions from
the Bugzilla README, Frequently Asked Questions, Database Schema
Document, and various mailing lists to create it. Chances are,
there are glaring errors in this documentation; please contact
&bzg-auth-email; to correct them.
</para>
</section>
<section id="copyright">
<title>Copyright Information</title>
<blockquote>
<attribution>Copyright (c) 2000-2001 &bzg-auth;</attribution>
<para>
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the
Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of
the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free
Documentation LIcense".
</para>
</blockquote>
<para>
If you have any questions regarding this document, its
copyright, or publishing this document in non-electronic form,
please contact &bzg-auth;.
</para>
</section>
<section id="disclaimer">
<title>Disclaimer</title>
<para>
No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted.
Use the concepts, examples, and other content at your own risk.
As this is a new edition of this document, there may be errors
and inaccuracies that may damage your system. Use of this
document may cause your girlfriend to leave you, your cats to
pee on your furniture and clothing, your computer to cease
functioning, your boss to fire you, and global thermonuclear
war. Proceed with caution.
</para>
<para>
All copyrights are held by their respective owners, unless
specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document
should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any
trademark or service mark.
</para>
<para>
Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as
endorsements, with the exception of the term "GNU/Linux". I
wholeheartedly endorse the use of GNU/Linux in every situation
where it is appropriate. It is an extremely versatile, stable,
and robust operating system that offers an ideal operating
environment for Bugzilla.
</para>
<para>
You are strongly recommended to make a backup of your system
before installing Bugzilla and at regular intervals thereafter.
Heaven knows it's saved my bacon time after time; if you
implement any suggestion in this Guide, implement this one!
</para>
<para>
Although the Bugzilla development team has taken great care to
ensure that all easily-exploitable bugs or options are
documented or fixed in the code, security holes surely exist.
Great care should be taken both in the installation and usage of
this software. Carefully consider the implications of installing
other network services with Bugzilla. The Bugzilla development
team members, Netscape Communications, America Online Inc., and
any affiliated developers or sponsors assume no liability for
your use of this product. You have the source code to this
product, and are responsible for auditing it yourself to insure
your security needs are met.
</para>
</section>
<!-- Section 2: New Versions -->
<section id="newversions">
<title>New Versions</title>
<para>
This is the &bzg-ver; version of The Bugzilla Guide. If you are
reading this from any source other than those below, please
check one of these mirrors to make sure you are reading an
up-to-date version of the Guide.
</para>
<para>
This document can be found in the following places:
</para>
<para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons/">TriloBYTE</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/">Mozilla.org</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="http://www.linuxdoc.org/">The Linux
Documentation Project</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
The latest version of this document can be checked out via CVS.
Please follow the instructions available at <ulink
url="http://www.mozilla.org/cvs.html">the Mozilla CVS page</ulink>, and check out the mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/docs/ branch.
</para>
</section>
<section id="credits">
<title>Credits</title>
<para>
The people listed below have made enormous contributions to the
creation of this Guide, through their dedicated hacking efforts,
numerous e-mail and IRC support sessions, and overall excellent
contribution to the Bugzilla community:
</para>
<para>
<ulink url="mailto://terry@mozilla.org">Terry Weissman</ulink>
for initially writing Bugzilla and creating the
README upon which the UNIX installation documentation is largely based.
</para>
<para>
<ulink url="mailto://tara@tequilarista.org">Tara
Hernandez</ulink> for keeping Bugzilla development going
strong after Terry left Mozilla.org
</para>
<para>
<ulink url="mailto://dkl@redhat.com">Dave Lawrence</ulink> for
providing insight into the key differences between Red Hat's
customized Bugzilla, and being largely responsible for the "Red
Hat Bugzilla" appendix
</para>
<para>
<ulink url="mailto://endico@mozilla.org">Dawn Endico</ulink> for
being a hacker extraordinaire and putting up with my incessant
questions and arguments on irc.mozilla.org in #mozwebtools
</para>
<para>
Last but not least, all the members of the <ulink
url="news://news.mozilla.org/netscape/public/mozilla/webtools"> netscape.public.mozilla.webtools</ulink> newsgroup. Without your discussions, insight, suggestions, and patches, this could never have happened.
</para>
</section>
<section id="contributors">
<title>Contributors</title>
<para>
Thanks go to these people for significant contributions to this
documentation (in no particular order):
</para>
<para>
Andrew Pearson, Spencer Smith, Eric Hanson, Kevin Brannen, Ron
Teitelbaum, Jacob Steenhagen, Joe Robins
</para>
</section>
<section id="feedback">
<title>Feedback</title>
<para>
I welcome feedback on this document. Without your submissions
and input, this Guide cannot continue to exist. Please mail
additions, comments, criticisms, etc. to
<email>barnboy@trilobyte.net</email>. Please send flames to
<email>devnull@localhost</email>
</para>
</section>
<section id="translations">
<title>Translations</title>
<para>
The Bugzilla Guide needs translators! Please volunteer your
translation into the language of your choice. If you will
translate this Guide, please notify the members of the
mozilla-webtools mailing list at
<email>mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org</email>, and arrange with
Matt Barnson to check it into CVS.
</para>
</section>
<!-- conventions used here (didn't want to give it a chapter of its own) -->
&conventions;
</chapter>
<!-- Keep this comment at the end of the file
Local variables:
mode: sgml
sgml-always-quote-attributes:t
sgml-auto-insert-required-elements:t
sgml-balanced-tag-edit:t
sgml-exposed-tags:nil
sgml-general-insert-case:lower
sgml-indent-data:t
sgml-indent-step:2
sgml-local-catalogs:nil
sgml-local-ecat-files:nil
sgml-minimize-attributes:nil
sgml-namecase-general:t
sgml-omittag:t
sgml-parent-document:("Bugzilla-Guide.sgml" "book" "chapter")
sgml-shorttag:t
sgml-tag-region-if-active:t
End: -->