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The Bugzilla Guide
Matthew P. Barnson
barnboy@trilobyte.net
Revision History
Revision v2.11 20 December 2000 Revised by: MPB
Converted the README, FAQ, and DATABASE information into SGML docbook
format.
Revision 2.11.1 06 March 2001 Revised by: MPB
Took way too long to revise this for 2.12 release. Updated FAQ to use
qandaset tags instead of literallayout, cleaned up administration
section, added User Guide section, miscellaneous FAQ updates and
third-party integration information. From this point on all new tags
are lowercase in preparation for the 2.13 release of the Guide in XML
format instead of SGML.
Revision 2.12.0 24 April 2001 Revised by: MPB
Things fixed this release: Elaborated on queryhelp interface, added
FAQ regarding moving bugs from one keyword to another, clarified
possible problems with the Landfill tutorial, fixed a boatload of
typos and unclear sentence structures. Incorporated the README into
the UNIX installation section, and changed the README to indicate the
deprecated status. Things I know need work: Used "simplelist" a lot,
where I should have used "procedure" to tag things. Need to lowercase
all tags to be XML compliant.
This is the documentation for Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug-tracking
system.
_________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
1. About This Guide
1.1. Purpose and Scope of this Guide
1.2. Copyright Information
1.3. Disclaimer
1.4. New Versions
1.5. Credits
1.6. Contributors
1.7. Feedback
1.8. Translations
1.9. Document Conventions
2. Installing Bugzilla
2.1. UNIX Installation
2.1.1. ERRATA
2.1.2. Step-by-step Install
2.1.2.1. Introduction
2.1.2.2. Installing the Prerequisites
2.1.2.3. Installing MySQL Database
2.1.2.4. Perl (5.004 or greater)
2.1.2.5. DBI Perl Module
2.1.2.6. Data::Dumper Perl Module
2.1.2.7. MySQL related Perl Module Collection
2.1.2.8. TimeDate Perl Module Collection
2.1.2.9. GD Perl Module (1.8.3)
2.1.2.10. Chart::Base Perl Module (0.99c)
2.1.2.11. DB_File Perl Module
2.1.2.12. HTTP Server
2.1.2.13. Installing the Bugzilla Files
2.1.2.14. Setting Up the MySQL Database
2.1.2.15. Tweaking "localconfig"
2.1.2.16. Setting Up Maintainers Manually (Optional)
2.1.2.17. The Whining Cron (Optional)
2.1.2.18. Bug Graphs (Optional)
2.1.2.19. Securing MySQL
2.1.2.20. Installation General Notes
2.2. Win32 (Win98+/NT/2K) Installation
2.2.1. Win32 Installation: Step-by-step
2.2.2. Additional Windows Tips
3. Administering Bugzilla
3.1. Post-Installation Checklist
3.2. User Administration
3.2.1. Creating the Default User
3.2.2. Managing Other Users
3.2.2.1. Logging In
3.2.2.2. Creating new users
3.2.2.3. Disabling Users
3.2.2.4. Modifying Users
3.3. Product, Component, Milestone, and Version Administration
3.3.1. Products
3.3.2. Components
3.3.3. Versions
3.3.4. Milestones
3.3.5. Voting
3.3.6. Groups and Group Security
3.4. Bugzilla Security
4. Using Bugzilla
4.1. What is Bugzilla?
4.2. Why Should We Use Bugzilla?
4.3. How do I use Bugzilla?
4.3.1. Create a Bugzilla Account
4.3.2. The Bugzilla Query Page
4.3.3. Creating and Managing Bug Reports
4.3.3.1. Writing a Great Bug Report
4.3.3.2. Managing your Bug Reports
4.4. What's in it for me?
4.4.1. Account Settings
4.4.2. Email Settings
4.4.2.1. Email Notification
4.4.2.2. New Email Technology
4.4.2.3. "Watching" Users
4.4.3. Page Footer
4.4.4. Permissions
4.5. Using Bugzilla-Conclusion
5. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools
5.1. Bonsai
5.2. CVS
5.3. Perforce SCM
5.4. Tinderbox
6. The Future of Bugzilla
6.1. Reducing Spam
6.2. Better Searching
6.3. Description Flags and Tracking Bugs
6.4. Bug Issues
6.5. Database Integrity
6.6. Bugzilla 3.0
A. The Bugzilla FAQ
B. Software Download Links
C. The Bugzilla Database
C.1. Database Schema Chart
C.2. MySQL Bugzilla Database Introduction
C.3. MySQL Permissions & Grant Tables
C.4. Cleaning up after mucking with Bugzilla
7. Bugzilla Variants
7.1. Red Hat Bugzilla
D. Useful Patches and Utilities for Bugzilla
D.1. The setperl.csh Utility
D.2. Command-line Bugzilla Queries
D.3. The Quicksearch Utility
E. GNU Free Documentation License
0. PREAMBLE
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
2. VERBATIM COPYING
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
4. MODIFICATIONS
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
8. TRANSLATION
9. TERMINATION
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
How to use this License for your documents
Glossary
List of Examples
2-1. Setting up bonsaitools symlink
2-2. Running checksetup.pl as the web user
2-3. Removing encrypt() for Windows NT installations
3-1. Creating some Components
3-2. Common Use of Versions
3-3. A Different Use of Versions
3-4. Using SortKey with Target Milestone
3-5. When to Use Group Security
3-6. Creating a New Group
4-1. Some Famous Software Versions
4-2. Mozilla Webtools Components
D-1. Using Setperl to set your perl path
1. A Sample Product
] >
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 1. About This Guide
1.1. Purpose and Scope of this Guide
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.
Despite the lack of updates, 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.
This release of the Bugzilla Guide is the 2.11 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 even-numbered point releases (1.2, 1.14, etc.) are considered
"stable releases", intended for public consumption; on the other hand,
odd-numbered point releases (1.3, 2.09, etc.) are considered unstable
development releases intended for advanced users, systems
administrators, developers, and those who enjoy a lot of pain.
Newer revisions of the Bugzilla Guide will follow the numbering
conventions of the main-tree Bugzilla releases, available at
Mozilla.org, with the exception that intermediate releases will have a
minor revision number following a period. For instance, if the current
version of Bugzilla is 4.2, the current "stable" version of the
Bugzilla guide, in, say, it's fifth revision, would be numbered
"4.2.5". Got it? Good.
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 <barnboy@trilobyte.net>
to correct them.
_________________________________________________________________
1.2. Copyright Information
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under thei 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".
--Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Matthew P. Barnson
If you have any questions regarding this document, its' copyright, or
publishing this document in non-electronic form, please contact
<barnboy@trilobyte.net>
_________________________________________________________________
1.3. Disclaimer
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.
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. In particular, I like to put down Microsoft(tm). Live with it.
Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as
endorsements, with the exception of the term "GNU/Linux". Use
GNU/Linux. Love it. Bathe with it. It is life and happiness. I endorse
it wholeheartedly and encourage you to do the same.
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!
Bugzilla has not undergone a complete security review. Security holes
probably exist in the code. 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.
_________________________________________________________________
1.4. New Versions
This is the initial release of the Bugzilla Guide.
This document can be found in the following places:
* TriloBYTE
* Mozilla.org
* The Linux Documentation Project
The latest version of this document can be checked out via CVS. Please
follow the instructions available at the Mozilla CVS page, and check
out the mozilla/webtools/bugzilla/docs/ branch.
_________________________________________________________________
1.5. Credits
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:
Terry Weissman for initially converting Bugzilla from BugSplat! and
writing the README upon which this documentation is largely based.
Tara Hernandez for keeping Bugzilla development going strong after
Terry left Mozilla.org
Dave Lawrence for providing insight into the key differences between
Red Hat's customized Bugzilla, and being largely responsible for the
"Red Hat Bugzilla" appendix
Dawn Endico for being a hacker extraordinaire and putting up with my
incessant questions and arguments on irc.mozilla.org in #mozwebtools
Last but not least, all the members of the
netscape.public.mozilla.webtools newsgroup. Without your discussions,
insight, suggestions, and patches, this could never have happened.
_________________________________________________________________
1.6. Contributors
Thanks go to these people for significant contributions to this
documentation (in no particular order):
Zach Lipton (significant textual contributions), Andrew Pearson,
Spencer Smith, Eric Hanson, Kevin Brannen,
_________________________________________________________________
1.7. Feedback
I welcome feedback on this document. Without your submissions and
input, this Guide cannot continue to exist. Please mail additions,
comments, criticisms, etc. to <barnboy@trilobyte.net>. Please send
flames to <devnull@localhost>
_________________________________________________________________
1.8. Translations
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 <mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org>. Since The Bugzilla Guide is
also hosted on the Linux Documentation Project, you would also do well
to notify
_________________________________________________________________
1.9. Document Conventions
This document uses the following conventions
Descriptions Appearance
Warnings
Caution
Warnings.
Hint
Tip: Hint.
Notes
Note: Note.
Information requiring special attention
Warning
Warning.
File Names file.extension
Directory Names directory
Commands to be typed command
Applications Names application
Prompt of users command under bash shell bash$
Prompt of root users command under bash shell bash#
Prompt of user command under tcsh shell tcsh$
Environment Variables VARIABLE
Emphasized word word
Code Example
<para>Beginning and end of paragraph</para>
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 2. Installing Bugzilla
2.1. UNIX Installation
2.1.1. ERRATA
Note: If you are installing Bugzilla on S.u.S.e. Linux, or some
other distributions with "paranoid" security options, it is
possible that the checksetup.pl script may fail with the error:
cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue): Permission denied This is because
your /var/spool/mqueue directory has a mode of "drwx------". Type
chmod 755 /var/spool/mqueue as root to fix this problem.
Note: Release Notes for Bugzilla 2.12 are available at
docs/rel_notes.txt
Note: The preferred documentation for Bugzilla is available in
docs/, with a variety of document types available. Please refer to
these documents when installing, configuring, and maintaining your
Bugzilla installation.
Warning
Bugzilla is not a package where you can just plop it in a directory,
twiddle a few things, and you're off. Installing Bugzilla assumes you
know your variant of UNIX or Microsoft Windows well, are familiar with
the command line, and are comfortable compiling and installing a
plethora of third-party utilities. To install Bugzilla on Win32
requires fair Perl proficiency, and if you use a webserver other than
Apache you should be intimately familiar with the security mechanisms
and CGI environment thereof.
Warning
Bugzilla has not undergone a complete security review. Security holes
may exist in the code. 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.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2. Step-by-step Install
2.1.2.1. Introduction
Installation of bugzilla is pretty straightforward, particularly if
your machine already has MySQL and the MySQL-related perl packages
installed. If those aren't installed yet, then that's the first order
of business. The other necessary ingredient is a web server set up to
run cgi scripts. While using Apache for your webserver is not
required, it is recommended.
Bugzilla has been successfully installed under Solaris, Linux, and
Win32. The peculiarities of installing on Win32 (Win98+/NT/2K) are not
included in this section of the Guide; please check out the "Win32
Installation Instructions" for further advice on getting Bugzilla to
work on Microsoft Windows.
The Bugzilla Guide is contained in the "docs/" folder. It is available
in plain text (docs/txt), HTML (docs/html), or SGML source
(docs/sgml).
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.2. Installing the Prerequisites
The software packages necessary for the proper running of bugzilla
are:
1. MySQL database server and the mysql client (3.22.5 or greater)
2. Perl (5.004 or greater)
3. DBI Perl module
4. Data::Dumper Perl module
5. DBD::mySQL
6. TimeDate Perl module collection
7. GD perl module (1.8.3) (optional, for bug charting)
8. Chart::Base Perl module (0.99c) (optional, for bug charting)
9. DB_File Perl module (optional, for bug charting)
10. The web server of your choice. Apache is recommended.
11. MIME::Parser Perl module (optional, for contrib/bug_email.pl
interface)
Note: You must run Bugzilla on a filesystem that supports file
locking via flock(). This is necessary for Bugzilla to operate
safely with multiple instances.
Warning
It is a good idea, while installing Bugzilla, to ensure it is not
accessible by other machines on the Internet. Your machine may be
vulnerable to attacks while you are installing. In other words, ensure
there is some kind of firewall between you and the rest of the
Internet. Many installation steps require an active Internet
connection to complete, but you must take care to ensure that at no
point is your machine vulnerable to an attack.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.3. Installing MySQL Database
Visit MySQL homepage at http://www.mysql.org/ and grab the latest
stable release of the server. Both binaries and source are available
and which you get shouldn't matter. Be aware that many of the binary
versions of MySQL store their data files in /var which on many
installations (particularly common with linux installations) is part
of a smaller root partition. If you decide to build from sources you
can easily set the dataDir as an option to configure.
If you've installed from source or non-package (RPM, deb, etc.)
binaries you'll want to make sure to add mysqld to your init scripts
so the server daemon will come back up whenever your machine reboots.
You also may want to edit those init scripts, to make sure that mysqld
will accept large packets. By default, mysqld is set up to only accept
packets up to 64K long. This limits the size of attachments you may
put on bugs. If you add something like "-O max_allowed_packet=1M" to
the command that starts mysqld (or safe_mysqld), then you will be able
to have attachments up to about 1 megabyte.
Note: If you plan on running Bugzilla and MySQL on the same
machine, consider using the "--skip-networking" option in the init
script. This enhances security by preventing network access to
MySQL.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.4. Perl (5.004 or greater)
Any machine that doesn't have perl on it is a sad machine indeed. Perl
for *nix systems can be gotten in source form from
http://www.perl.com.
Perl is now a far cry from the the single compiler/interpreter binary
it once was. It now includes a great many required modules and quite a
few other support files. If you're not up to or not inclined to build
perl from source, you'll want to install it on your machine using some
sort of packaging system (be it RPM, deb, or what have you) to ensure
a sane install. In the subsequent sections you'll be installing quite
a few perl modules; this can be quite ornery if your perl installation
isn't up to snuff.
Tip: You can skip the following Perl module installation steps by
installing "Bundle::Bugzilla" from CPAN, which includes them. All
Perl module installation steps require you have an active Internet
connection.
bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install "Bundle::Bugzilla"'
Bundle::Bugzilla doesn't include GD, Chart::Base, or MIME::Parser,
which are not essential to a basic Bugzilla install. If installing
this bundle fails, you should install each module individually to
isolate the problem.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.5. DBI Perl Module
The DBI module is a generic Perl module used by other database related
Perl modules. For our purposes it's required by the MySQL-related
modules. As long as your Perl installation was done correctly the DBI
module should be a breeze. It's a mixed Perl/C module, but Perl's
MakeMaker system simplifies the C compilation greatly.
Like almost all Perl modules DBI can be found on the Comprehensive
Perl Archive Network (CPAN) at http://www.cpan.org. The CPAN servers
have a real tendency to bog down, so please use mirrors. The current
location at the time of this writing (02/17/99) can be found in
Appendix A.
Quality, general Perl module installation instructions can be found on
the CPAN website, but the easy thing to do is to just use the CPAN
shell which does all the hard work for you.
To use the CPAN shell to install DBI:
bash# perl -MCPAN -e 'install "DBI"'
Note: Replace "DBI" with the name of whichever module you wish to
install, such as Data::Dumper, TimeDate, GD, etc.
To do it the hard way:
Untar the module tarball -- it should create its own directory
CD to the directory just created, and enter the following commands:
1. bash# perl Makefile.PL
2. bash# make
3. bash# make test
4. bash# make install
If everything went ok that should be all it takes. For the vast
majority of perl modules this is all that's required.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.6. Data::Dumper Perl Module
The Data::Dumper module provides data structure persistence for Perl
(similar to Java's serialization). It comes with later sub-releases of
Perl 5.004, but a re-installation just to be sure it's available won't
hurt anything.
Data::Dumper is used by the MySQL related Perl modules. It can be
found on CPAN (link in Appendix A) and can be installed by following
the same four step make sequence used for the DBI module.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.7. MySQL related Perl Module Collection
The Perl/MySQL interface requires a few mutually-dependent perl
modules. These modules are grouped together into the the
Msql-Mysql-modules package. This package can be found at CPAN. After
the archive file has been downloaded it should be untarred.
The MySQL modules are all built using one make file which is generated
by running: bash# perl Makefile.pl
The MakeMaker process will ask you a few questions about the desired
compilation target and your MySQL installation. For many of the
questions the provided default will be adequate.
When asked if your desired target is the MySQL or mSQL packages
selected the MySQL related ones. Later you will be asked if you wish
to provide backwards compatibility with the older MySQL packages; you
must answer YES to this question. The default will be no, and if you
select it things won't work later.
A host of 'localhost' should be fine and a testing user of 'test' and
a null password should find itself with sufficient access to run tests
on the 'test' database which MySQL created upon installation. If 'make
test' and 'make install' go through without errors you should be ready
to go as far as database connectivity is concerned.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.8. TimeDate Perl Module Collection
Many of the more common date/time/calendar related Perl modules have
been grouped into a bundle similar to the MySQL modules bundle. This
bundle is stored on the CPAN under the name TimeDate. A (hopefully
current) link can be found in Appendix A. The component module we're
most interested in is the Date::Format module, but installing all of
them is probably a good idea anyway. The standard Perl module
installation instructions should work perfectly for this simple
package.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.9. GD Perl Module (1.8.3)
The GD library was written by Thomas Boutell a long while ago to
programatically generate images in C. Since then it's become almost a
defacto standard for programatic image construction. The Perl bindings
to it found in the GD library are used on a million web pages to
generate graphs on the fly. That's what bugzilla will be using it for
so you'd better install it if you want any of the graphing to work.
Actually bugzilla uses the Graph module which relies on GD itself, but
isn't that always the way with OOP. At any rate, you can find the GD
library on CPAN (link in Appendix "Required Software").
Note: The Perl GD library requires some other libraries that may or
may not be installed on your system, including "libpng" and
"libgd". The full requirements are listed in the Perl GD library
README. Just realize that if compiling GD fails, it's probably
because you're missing a required library.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.10. Chart::Base Perl Module (0.99c)
The Chart module provides bugzilla with on-the-fly charting abilities.
It can be installed in the usual fashion after it has been fetched
from CPAN where it is found as the Chart-x.x... tarball in a directory
to be listed in Appendix "Required Software". Note that as with the GD
perl module, only the specific versions listed above (or newer) will
work. Earlier versions used GIF's, which are no longer supported by
the latest versions of GD.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.11. DB_File Perl Module
DB_File is a module which allows Perl programs to make use of the
facilities provided by Berkeley DB version 1.x. This module is
required by collectstats.pl which is used for bug charting. If you
plan to make use of bug charting, you must install this module.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.12. HTTP Server
You have a freedom of choice here - Apache, Netscape or any other
server on UNIX would do. You can easily run the web server on a
different machine than MySQL, but need to adjust the MySQL "bugs" user
permissions accordingly.
You'll want to make sure that your web server will run any file with
the .cgi extension as a cgi and not just display it. If you're using
apache that means uncommenting the following line in the srm.conf
file: AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
With apache you'll also want to make sure that within the access.conf
file the line: Options ExecCGI is in the stanza that covers the
directories you intend to put the bugzilla .html and .cgi files into.
If you are using a newer version of Apache, both of the above lines
will be (or will need to be) in the httpd.conf file, rather than
srm.conf or access.conf.
Warning
There are two critical directories and a file that should not be a
served by the HTTP server. These are the 'data' and 'shadow'
directories and the 'localconfig' file. You should configure your HTTP
server to not serve content from these files. Failure to do so will
expose critical passwords and other data. Please see your HTTP server
configuration manual on how to do this. If you use quips (at the top
of the buglist pages) you will want the 'data/comments' file to still
be served. This file contains those quips.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.13. Installing the Bugzilla Files
You should untar the Bugzilla files into a directory that you're
willing to make writable by the default web server user (probably
'nobody'). You may decide to put the files off of the main web space
for your web server or perhaps off of /usr/local with a symbolic link
in the web space that points to the bugzilla directory. At any rate,
just dump all the files in the same place (optionally omitting the CVS
directories if they were accidentally tarred up with the rest of
Bugzilla) and make sure you can access the files in that directory
through your web server.
Tip: If you symlink the bugzilla directory into your Apache's HTML
heirarchy, you may receive "Forbidden" errors unless you add the
"FollowSymLinks" directive to the <Directory> entry for the HTML
root.
Once all the files are in a web accessible directory, make that
directory writable by your webserver's user (which may require just
making it world writable). This is a temporary step until you run the
post-install "checksetup.pl" script, which locks down your
installation.
Lastly, you'll need to set up a symbolic link to
/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl for the correct location of your perl
executable (probably /usr/bin/perl). Otherwise you must hack all the
.cgi files to change where they look for perl. To make future upgrades
easier, you should use the symlink approach.
Example 2-1. Setting up bonsaitools symlink
Here's how you set up the Perl symlink on Linux to make Bugzilla work.
Your mileage may vary; if you are running on Solaris, you probably
need to subsitute "/usr/local/bin/perl" for "/usr/bin/perl" below; if
on certain other UNIX systems, Perl may live in weird places like
"/opt/perl". As root, run these commands:
bash# mkdir /usr/bonsaitools
bash# mkdir /usr/bonsaitools/bin
bash# ln -s /usr/bin/perl /usr/bosaitools/bin/perl
Tip: If you don't have root access to set this symlink up, check
out the "setperl.csh" utility, listed in the Patches section of
this Guide. It will change the path to perl in all your Bugzilla
files for you.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.14. Setting Up the MySQL Database
After you've gotten all the software installed and working you're
ready to start preparing the database for its life as a the back end
to a high quality bug tracker.
First, you'll want to fix MySQL permissions to allow access from
Bugzilla. For the purpose of this Installation section, the Bugzilla
username will be "bugs", and will have minimal permissions. Bugzilla
has not undergone a thorough security audit. It may be possible for a
system cracker to somehow trick Bugzilla into executing a command such
as "; DROP DATABASE mysql".
That would be bad.
Give the MySQL root user a password. MySQL passwords are limited to 16
characters.
bash# mysql -u root mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD ('new_password') WHERE
user='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
From this point on, if you need to access MySQL as the MySQL root
user, you will need to use "mysql -u root -p" and enter your
new_password. Remember that MySQL user names have nothing to do with
Unix user names (login names).
Next, we create the "bugs" user, and grant sufficient permissions for
checksetup.pl, which we'll use later, to work its magic. This also
restricts the "bugs" user to operations within a database called
"bugs", and only allows the account to connect from "localhost".
Modify it to reflect your setup if you will be connecting from another
machine or as a different user.
Remember to set bugs_password to some unique password.
mysql> GRANT SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,INDEX,
ALTER,CREATE,DROP,REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY
'bugs_password';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Next, run the magic checksetup.pl script. (Many thanks to Holger
Schurig <holgerschurig@nikocity.de> for writing this script!) It will
make sure Bugzilla files and directories have reasonable permissions,
set up the "data" directory, and create all the MySQL tables.
bash# ./checksetup.pl
The first time you run it, it will create a file called "localconfig".
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.15. Tweaking "localconfig"
This file contains a variety of settings you may need to tweak
including how Bugzilla should connect to the MySQL database.
The connection settings include:
1. server's host: just use "localhost" if the MySQL server is local
2. database name: "bugs" if you're following these directions
3. MySQL username: "bugs" if you're following these directions
4. Password for the "bugs" MySQL account above
Once you are happy with the settings, re-run checksetup.pl. On this
second run, it will create the database and an administrator account
for which you will be prompted to provide information.
When logged into an administrator account once Bugzilla is running, if
you go to the query page (off of the bugzilla main menu), you'll find
an 'edit parameters' option that is filled with editable treats.
Should everything work, you should have a nearly empty copy of the bug
tracking setup.
The second time around, checksetup.pl will stall if it is on a
filesystem that does not fully support file locking via flock(), such
as NFS mounts. This support is required for Bugzilla to operate safely
with multiple instances. If flock() is not fully supported, it will
stall at: Now regenerating the shadow database for all bugs.
Note: The second time you run checksetup.pl, you should become the
user your web server runs as, and that you ensure you have set the
"webservergroup" parameter in localconfig to match the web server's
group name, if any. I believe, for the next release of Bugzilla,
this will be fixed so that Bugzilla supports a "webserveruser"
parameter in localconfig as well.
Example 2-2. Running checksetup.pl as the web user
Assuming your web server runs as user "apache", and Bugzilla is
installed in "/usr/local/bugzilla", here's one way to run
checksetup.pl as the web server user. As root, for the second run of
checksetup.pl, do this:
bash# chown -R apache:apache /usr/local/bugzilla
bash# su - apache
bash# cd /usr/local/bugzilla
bash# ./checksetup.pl
Note: The checksetup.pl script is designed so that you can run it
at any time without causing harm. You should run it after any
upgrade to Bugzilla.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.16. Setting Up Maintainers Manually (Optional)
If you want to add someone else to every group by hand, you can do it
by typing the appropriate MySQL commands. Run ' mysql -u root -p bugs'
(you may need different parameters, depending on your security
settings according to section 3, above). Then:
mysql> update profiles set groupset=0x7fffffffffffffff where
login_name = 'XXX';
replacing XXX with the Bugzilla email address.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.17. The Whining Cron (Optional)
By now you've got a fully functional bugzilla, but what good are bugs
if they're not annoying? To help make those bugs more annoying you can
set up bugzilla's automatic whining system. This can be done by adding
the following command as a daily crontab entry (for help on that see
that crontab man page):
cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./whineatnews.pl
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.18. Bug Graphs (Optional)
As long as you installed the GD and Graph::Base Perl modules you might
as well turn on the nifty bugzilla bug reporting graphs.
Add a cron entry like this to run collectstats daily at 5 after
midnight:
bash# crontab -e
5 0 * * * cd <your-bugzilla-directory> ; ./collectstats.pl
After two days have passed you'll be able to view bug graphs from the
Bug Reports page.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.19. Securing MySQL
If you followed the README for setting up your "bugs" and "root" user
in MySQL, much of this should not apply to you. If you are upgrading
an existing installation of Bugzilla, you should pay close attention
to this section.
Most MySQL installs have "interesting" default security parameters:
mysqld defaults to running as root
it defaults to allowing external network connections
it has a known port number, and is easy to detect
it defaults to no passwords whatsoever
it defaults to allowing "File_Priv"
This means anyone from anywhere on the internet can not only drop the
database with one SQL command, and they can write as root to the
system.
To see your permissions do:
bash# mysql -u root -p
mysql> use mysql;
mysql> show tables;
mysql> select * from user;
mysql> select * from db;
To fix the gaping holes:
DELETE FROM user WHERE User='';
UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('new_password') WHERE user='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
If you're not running "mit-pthreads" you can use:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO bugs@localhost;
GRANT ALL ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost;
REVOKE DROP ON bugs.* FROM bugs@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
With "mit-pthreads" you'll need to modify the "globals.pl"
Mysql->Connect line to specify a specific host name instead of
"localhost", and accept external connections:
GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO bugs@bounce.hop.com;
GRANT ALL ON bugs.* TO bugs@bounce.hop.com;
REVOKE DROP ON bugs.* FROM bugs@bounce.hop.com;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Consider also:
1. Turning off external networking with "--skip-networking", unless
you have "mit-pthreads", in which case you can't. Without
networking, MySQL connects with a Unix domain socket.
2. using the --user= option to mysqld to run it as an unprivileged
user.
3. starting MySQL in a chroot jail
4. running the httpd in a "chrooted" jail
5. making sure the MySQL passwords are different from the OS
passwords (MySQL "root" has nothing to do with system "root").
6. running MySQL on a separate untrusted machine
7. making backups ;-)
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.20. Installation General Notes
2.1.2.20.1. Modifying Your Running System
Bugzilla optimizes database lookups by storing all relatively static
information in the versioncache file, located in the data/
subdirectory under your installation directory (we said before it
needs to be writable, right?!)
If you make a change to the structural data in your database (the
versions table for example), or to the "constants" encoded in
defparams.pl, you will need to remove the cached content from the data
directory (by doing a "rm data/versioncache"), or your changes won't
show up!
That file gets automatically regenerated whenever it's more than an
hour old, so Bugzilla will eventually notice your changes by itself,
but generally you want it to notice right away, so that you can test
things.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.20.2. Upgrading From Previous Versions
The developers of Bugzilla are constantly adding new tables, columns
and fields. You'll get SQL errors if you just update the code. The
strategy to update is to simply always run the checksetup.pl script
whenever you upgrade your installation of Bugzilla. If you want to see
what has changed, you can read the comments in that file, starting
from the end.
_________________________________________________________________
2.1.2.20.3. UNIX Installation Instructions History
This document was originally adapted from the Bonsai installation
instructions by Terry Weissman <terry@mozilla.org>.
The February 25, 1999 re-write of this page was done by Ry4an Brase
<ry4an@ry4an.org>, with some edits by Terry Weissman, Bryce Nesbitt,
Martin Pool, & Dan Mosedale (But don't send bug reports to them!
Report them using bugzilla, at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi , project Webtools,
component Bugzilla).
This document was heavily modified again Wednesday, March 07 2001 to
reflect changes for Bugzilla 2.12 release by Matthew P. Barnson. The
securing MySQL section should be changed to become standard procedure
for Bugzilla installations.
Finally, the README in its entirety was marked up in SGML and included
into the Guide on April 24, 2001.
Comments from people using this Guide for the first time are
particularly welcome.
_________________________________________________________________
2.2. Win32 (Win98+/NT/2K) Installation
These directions have not been extensively tested. We need testers!
Please try these out and post any changes to the newsgroup.
_________________________________________________________________
2.2.1. Win32 Installation: Step-by-step
Note: You should be familiar with, and cross-reference, the UNIX
README while performing your Win32 installation. Unfortunately,
Win32 directions are not yet as detailed as those for UNIX.
The most critical difference for Win32 users is the lack of support
for a crypt() function in MySQL for Windows. It does not have it!
All ENCRYPT statements must be modified.
1. Install Apache Web Server for Windows.
Note: You may also use Internet Information Server or Personal Web
Server for this purpose. However, setup is slightly more difficult.
If ActivePerl doesn't seem to handle your file associations
correctly (for .cgi and .pl files), please consult the FAQ, in the
"Win32" section.
If you are going to use IIS, if on Windows NT you must be updated
to at least Service Pack 4.
2. Install ActivePerl
Please also check the following links to fully understand the
status of ActivePerl on Win32: Perl Porting, and Hixie Click Here
3. Use ppm from your perl\bin directory to install the following
packs: DBI, DBD-Mysql, TimeDate, Chart, Date-Calc, Date-Manip, and
GD. You may need to extract them from .zip format using Winzip or
other unzip program first. These additional ppm modules can be
downloaded from ActiveState.
The syntax for ppm is: C:> ppm install <module>.ppd
You can find ActiveState ppm modules at
http://www.activestate.com/PPMPackages/5.6plus
4. Download and install the Windows GNU tools from www.cygwin.com.
Make sure the GNU utilities are in your $PATH.
5. Install MySQL for NT.
Note: Your configuration file for MySQL must be named C:\MY.CNF.
6. Setup MySQL
a. C:> C:\mysql\bin\mysql -u root mysql
b. mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE Host='localhost' AND User='';
c. mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD ('new_password')
WHERE user='root';
d. mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER,
CREATE, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.* to bugs@localhost
IDENTIFIED BY 'bugs_password';
e. mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
f. mysql> create database bugs;
g. mysql> exit
h. C:> C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root -p reload
7. Configure Bugzilla. For Win32, this involves editing
"defparams.pl" and "localconfig" to taste. Running "checksetup.pl"
should create localconfig for you. Note that getgrnam() doesn't
work, and should be deleted. Change this line: "my $webservergid =
getgrnam($my_webservergroup); " to "my $webservergid =
$my_webservergroup; "
8.
Note: There are several alternatives to Sendmail that will work on
Win32. The one mentioned here is a suggestion, not a requirement.
Some other mail packages that can work include BLAT, Windmail,
Mercury Sendmail, and the CPAN Net::SMTP Perl module (available in
.ppm). Every option requires some hacking of the Perl scripts for
Bugzilla to make it work. The option here simply requires the
least.
Download NTsendmail, available from www.ntsendmail.com. In order
for it to work, you must set up some new environment variables
(detailed on the ntsendmail home page). Figuring out where to put
those variables is left as an exercise for the reader. You must
have a "real" mail server which allows you to relay off it in your
$ENV{"NTsendmail"} (which you should probably place in globals.pl)
Once downloaded and installed, modify all open(SENDMAIL) calls to
open "| c:\ntsendmail\ntsendmail -t" instead of
"|/usr/lib/sendmail -t".
Note: We need someone to test this and make sure this works as
advertised.
9. Modify globals.pl and CGI.pl to remove the word "encrypt".
Note: I'm not sure this is all that is involved to remove crypt.
Any NT Bugzilla hackers want to pipe up?
10. Change all references to "processmail" to "processmail.pl" in all
files, and rename "processmail" to "processmail.pl"
Note: I really think this may be a change we want to make for
main-tree Bugzilla. It's painless for the UNIX folks, and will make
the Win32 people happier.
11. Modify the path to perl on the first line (#!) of all files to
point to your Perl installation, and add "perl" to the beginning
of all Perl system calls that use a perl script as an argument.
This may take you a while. There is a "setperl.pl" utility to
speed part of this procedure, available in the "Patches and
Utilities" section of The Bugzilla Guide.
12. In processmail.pl, add "binmode(HANDLE)" before all read() calls.
This may not be necessary, but in some cases the read() under
Win32 doesn't count the EOL's without using a binary read().
_________________________________________________________________
2.2.2. Additional Windows Tips
Tip: From Andrew Pearson:
"You can make Bugzilla work with Personal Web Server for Windows 98
and higher, as well as for IIS 4.0. Microsoft has information
available at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q231/9/98.ASP
Basically you need to add two String Keys in the registry at the
following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC\Paramete
rs\ScriptMap
The keys should be called ".pl" and ".cgi", and both should have a
value something like: c:/perl/bin/perl.exe "%s" "%s"
The KB article only talks about .pl, but it goes into more detail
and provides a perl test script.
Tip: "Brian" had this to add, about upgrading to Bugzilla 2.12 from
previous versions:
Hi - I am updating bugzilla to 2.12 so I can tell you what I did
(after I deleted the current dir and copied the files in).
In checksetup.pl, I did the following...
1.
my $webservergid = getgrnam($my_webservergroup);
to
my $webservergid = 'Administrators'
2. I then ran checksetup.pl
3. I removed all the encrypt()
Example 2-3. Removing encrypt() for Windows NT installations
Replace this:
SendSQL("SELECT encrypt(" . SqlQuote($enteredpwd) . ", " .
SqlQuote(substr($realcryptpwd, 0, 2)) . ")");
my $enteredcryptpwd = FetchOneColumn();
with this:
my $enteredcryptpwd = $enteredpwd
in cgi.pl.
4. I renamed processmail to processmail.pl
5. I altered the sendmail statements to windmail:
open SENDMAIL, "|\"C:/General/Web/tools/Windmail 4.0 Beta/windmail\" -t > mail.
log";
The quotes around the dir is for the spaces. mail.log is for the
output
Tip: This was some late breaking information from Jan Evert. Sorry
for the lack of formatting.
I'm busy installing bugzilla on a WinNT machine and I thought I'd n
otify you
at this moment of the commments I have to section 2.2.1 of the bugz
illa
guide (at http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons/html/).
Step 1:
I've used apache, installation is really straightforward.
After reading the Unix installation instructions, I found that it i
s
necessary to add the ExecCGI option to the bugzilla directory. Also
the
'AddHandler' line for .cgi is by default commented out.
Step 3: although just a detail, 'ppm install <module%gt;' will also
work
(wihtout .ppd). And, it can also download these automatically from
ActiveState.
Step 4: although I have cygwin installed, it seems that it is not n
ecessary.
On my machine cygwin is not in the PATH and everything seems to wor
k as
expected.
However, I've not used everything yet.
Step 6: the 'bugs_password' given in SQL command d needs to be edit
ed into
localconfig later on (Step 7) if the password is not empty. I've al
so edited
it into globals.pl, but I'm not sure that is needed. In both places
, the
variable is named db_pass.
Step 8: all the sendmail replacements mentioned are not as simple a
s
described there. Since I am not familiar (yet) with perl, I don't h
ave any
mail working yet.
Step 9: in globals.pl the encrypt() call can be replaced by just th
e
unencrypted password. In CGI.pl, the complete SQL command can be re
moved.
Step 11: I've only changed the #! lines in *.cgi. I haven't noticed
problems
with the system() call yet.
There seem to be only four system() called programs: processmail.pl
(handled
by step 10), syncshadowdb (which should probably get the same treat
ment as
processmail.pl), diff and mysqldump. The last one is only needed wi
th the
shadowdb feature (which I don't use).
There seems to be one step missing: copying the bugzilla files some
hwere
that apache can serve them.
Just noticed the updated guide... Brian's comment is new. His first
comment
will work, but opens up a huge security hole.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 3. Administering Bugzilla
Or, I just got this cool thing installed. Now what the heck do I do
with it?
So you followed the README isntructions to the letter, and just logged
into bugzilla with your super-duper god account and you are sitting at
the query screen. Yet, you have nothing to query. Your first act of
business needs to be to setup the operating parameters for bugzilla.
_________________________________________________________________
3.1. Post-Installation Checklist
After installation, follow the checklist below to ensure that you have
a successful installation. If you do not see a recommended setting for
a parameter, consider leaving it at the default while you perform your
initial tests on your Bugzilla setup.
1. Bring up "editparams.cgi" in your web browser. For instance, to
edit parameters at mozilla.org, the URL would be
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/editparams.cgi, also available under
the "edit parameters" link on your query page.
2. Set "maintainer" to your email address. This allows Bugzilla's
error messages to display your email address and allow people to
contact you for help.
3. Set "urlbase" to the URL reference for your Bugzilla installation.
If your bugzilla query page is at
http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/query.cgi, your url base is
http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/
4. Set "usebuggroups" to "1" only if you need to restrict access to
products. I suggest leaving this parameter off while initially
testing your Bugzilla.
5. Set "usebuggroupsentry" to "1" if you want to restrict access to
products. Once again, if you are simply testing your installation,
I suggest against turning this parameter on; the strict security
checking may stop you from being able to modify your new entries.
6. Set "shadowdb" to "bug_shadowdb" if you will be running a *very*
large installation of Bugzilla. The shadow database enables many
simultaneous users to read and write to the database without
interfering with one another.
Note: Enabling "shadowdb" can adversely affect the stability of
your installation of Bugzilla. You may frequently need to manually
synchronize your databases, or schedule nightly syncs via "cron"
Once again, in testing you should avoid this option -- use it if
or when you need to use it, and have repeatedly run into the
problem it was designed to solve -- very long wait times while
attempting to commit a change to the database.
If you use the "shadowdb" option, it is only natural that you
should turn the "queryagainstshadowdb" option "On" as well.
Otherwise you are replicating data into a shadow database for no
reason!
7. If you have custom logos or HTML you must put in place to fit
within your site design guidelines, place the code in the
"headerhtml", "footerhtml", "errorhtml", "bannerhtml", or
"blurbhtml" text boxes.
Note: The "headerhtml" text box is the HTML printed out before any
other code on the page. If you have a special banner, put the code
for it in "bannerhtml". You may want to leave these settings at the
defaults initially.
8. Add any text you wish to the "passwordmail" parameter box. For
instance, many people choose to use this box to give a quick
training blurb about how to use Bugzilla at your site.
9. Ensure "newemailtech" is "on". Your users will thank you. This is
the default in the post-2.12 world, and is only an issue if you
are upgrading.
10. Do you want to use the qa contact ("useqacontact") and status
whiteboard ("usestatuswhiteboard") fields? These fields are useful
because they allow for more flexibility, particularly when you
have an existing Quality Assurance and/or Release Engineering
team, but they may not be needed for smaller installations.
11. Set "whinedays" to the amount of days you want to let bugs go in
the "New" or "Reopened" state before notifying people they have
untouched new bugs. If you do not plan to use this feature, simply
do not set up the whining cron job described in the README, or set
this value to "0".
12. Set the "commenton" options according to your site policy. It is a
wise idea to require comments when users resolve, reassign, or
reopen bugs.
Note: It is generally far better to require a developer comment
when resolving bugs than not. Few things are more annoying to bug
database users than having a developer mark a bug "fixed" without
any comment as to what the fix was (or even that it was truly
fixed!)
13. Set "supportwatchers" to "On". This feature is helpful for team
leads to monitor progress in their respective areas, and can offer
many other benefits, such as allowing a developer to pick up a
former engineer's bugs without requiring her to change all the
information in the bug.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2. User Administration
User administration is one of the easiest parts of Bugzilla. Keeping
it from getting out of hand, however, can become a challenge.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.1. Creating the Default User
When you first run checksetup.pl after installing Bugzilla, it will
prompt you for the administrative username (email address) and
password for this "super user". If for some reason you were to delete
the "super user" account, re-running checksetup.pl will again prompt
you for this username and password.
Tip: If you wish to add more administrative users, you must use the
MySQL interface. Run "mysql" from the command line, and use these
commands ("mysql>" denotes the mysql prompt, not something you
should type in): mysql> use bugs; mysql> update profiles set
groupset=0x7ffffffffffffff where login_name = "(user's login
name)";
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.2. Managing Other Users
3.2.2.1. Logging In
1. Open the index.html page for your Bugzilla installation in your
browser window.
2. Click the "Query Existing Bug Reports" link.
3. Click the "Log In" link at the foot of the page.
4. Type your email address, and the password which was emailed to you
when you created your Bugzilla account, into the spaces provided.
Congratulations, you are logged in!
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.2.2. Creating new users
Your users can create their own user accounts by clicking the "New
Account" link at the bottom of each page. However, should you desire
to create user accounts ahead of time, here is how you do it.
1. After logging in, click the "Users" link at the footer of the
query page.
2. To see a specific user, type a portion of their login name in the
box provided and click "submit". To see all users, simply click
the "submit" button. You must click "submit" here to be able to
add a new user.
Tip: More functionality is available via the list on the right-hand
side of the text entry box. You can match what you type as a
case-insensitive substring (the default) of all users on your
system, a case-sensitive regular expression (please see the "man
regexp" manual page for details on regular expression syntax), or a
reverse regular expression match, where every user name which does
NOT match the regular expression is selected.
3. Click the "Add New User" link at the bottom of the user list
4. Fill out the form presented. This page is self-explanatory. When
done, click "submit".
Note: Adding a user this way will not send an email informing them
of their username and password. In general, it is preferable to log
out and use the "New Account" button to create users, as it will
pre-populate all the required fields and also notify the user of
her account name and password.
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.2.3. Disabling Users
I bet you noticed that big "Disabled Text" entry box available from
the "Add New User" screen, when you edit an account? By entering any
text in this box and selecting "submit", you have prevented the user
from using Bugzilla via the web interface. Your explanation, written
in this text box, will be presented to the user the next time she
attempts to use the system.
Warning
Don't disable your own administrative account, or you will hate life!
_________________________________________________________________
3.2.2.4. Modifying Users
Here I will attempt to describe the function of each option on the
user edit screen.
* Login Name: This is generally the user's email address. However,
if you have edited your system parameters, this may just be the
user's login name or some other identifier.
Tip: For compatability reasons, you should probably stick with
email addresses as user login names. It will make your life easier.
* Real Name: Duh!
* Password: You will only see asterisks in versions of Bugzilla
newer than 2.10 or early 2.11. You can change the user password
here.
* Email Notification: You may choose from one of three options:
1. All qualifying bugs except those which I change: The user
will be notified of any change to any bug for which she is
the reporter, assignee, Q/A contact, CC recipient, or
"watcher".
2. Only those bugs which I am listed on the CC line: The user
will not be notified of changes to bugs where she is the
assignee, reporter, or Q/A contact, but will receive them if
she is on the CC list.
Note: She will still receive whining cron emails if you set up the
"whinemail" feature.
3. All Qualifying Bugs: This user is a glutton for punishment.
If her name is in the reporter, Q/A contact, CC, assignee, or
is a "watcher", she will get email updates regarding the bug.
Disable Text: If you type anything in this box, including just a
space, the user account is disabled from making any changes to
bugs via the web interface, and what you type in this box is
presented as the reason.
Warning
Don't disable the administrator account!
Note: As of this writing, the user can still submit bugs via the
e-mail gateway, if you set it up, despite the disabled text field.
The e-mail gateway should not be enabled for secure installations
of Bugzilla.
* CanConfirm: This field is only used if you have enabled
"unconfirmed" status in your parameters screen. If you enable this
for a user, that user can then move bugs from "Unconfirmed" to
"Confirmed" status (ergo: "New" status). Be judicious about
allowing users to turn this bit on for other users.
* Creategroups: This option will allow a user to create and destroy
groups in Bugzilla. Unless you are using the Bugzilla GroupSentry
security option "usebuggroupsentry" in your parameters, this
setting has no effect.
* Editbugs: Unless a user has this bit set, they can only edit those
bugs for which they are the assignee or the reporter.
Note: Leaving this option unchecked does not prevent users from
adding comments to a bug! They simply cannot change a bug priority,
severity, etc. unless they are the assignee or reporter.
* Editcomponents: This flag allows a user to create new products and
components, as well as modify and destroy those that have no bugs
associated with them. If a product or component has bugs
associated with it, those bugs must be moved to a different
product or component before Bugzilla will allow them to be
destroyed. The name of a product or component can be changed
without affecting the associated bugs, but it tends to annoy the
hell out of your users when these change a lot.
* Editkeywords: If you use Bugzilla's keyword functionality,
enabling this feature allows a user can create and destroy
keywords. As always, the keywords for existing bugs containing the
keyword the user wishes to destroy must be changed before Bugzilla
will allow it to die. You must be very careful about creating too
many new keywords if you run a very large Bugzilla installation;
keywords are global variables across products, and you can often
run into a phenomenon called "keyword bloat". This confuses users,
and then the feature goes unused.
* Editusers: This flag allows a user do what you're doing right now:
edit other users. This will allow those with the right to do so to
remove administrator priveleges from other users or grant them to
themselves. Enable with care.
* PRODUCT: PRODUCT bugs access. This allows an administrator, with
product-level granularity, to specify in which products a user can
edit bugs. The user must still have the "editbugs" privelege to
edit bugs in this area; this simply restricts them from even
seeing bugs outside these boundaries if the administrator has
enabled the group sentry parameter "usebuggroupsentry". Unless you
are using bug groups, this option has no effect.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3. Product, Component, Milestone, and Version Administration
Dear Lord, we have to get our users to do WHAT?
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.1. Products
Formerly, and in some spots still, called "Programs"
Products are the broadest category in Bugzilla, and you should have
the least of these. If your company makes computer games, you should
have one product per game, and possibly a few special products
(website, meetings...)
A Product (formerly called "Program", and still referred to that way
in some portions of the source code) controls some very important
functions. The number of "votes" available for users to vote for the
most important bugs is set per-product, as is the number of votes
required to move a bug automatically from the UNCONFIRMED status to
the NEW status. One can close a Product for further bug entry and
define various Versions available from the Edit Product screen.
To create a new product:
1. Select "components" from the yellow footer
Tip: It may seem counterintuitive to click "components" when you
want to edit the properties associated with Products. This is one
of a long list of things we want in Bugzilla 3.0...
2. Select the "Add" link to the right of "Add a new product".
3. Enter the name of the product and a description. The Description
field is free-form.
Tip: Don't worry about the "Closed for bug entry", "Maximum Votes
per person", "Maximum votes a person can put on a single bug",
"Number of votes a bug in this Product needs to automatically get
out of the UNCOMFIRMED state", and "Version" options yet. We'll
cover those in a few moments.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.2. Components
Components are subsections of a Product.
Example 3-1. Creating some Components
The computer game you are designing may a "UI" component, an "API"
component, a "Sound System" component, and a "Plugins" component, each
overseen by a different programmer. It often makes sense to divide
Components in Bugzilla according to the natural divisions of
responsibility within your Product or company.
Each component has a owner and (if you turned it on in the
parameters), a qa contact. The owner should be the primary person who
fixes bugs in that component. The QA Contact should be the person who
will ensure these bugs are completely fixed. The Owner, QA Contact,
and Reporter will get email when new bugs are created in this
Component and when these bugs change. Default Owner and Default QA
Contact fields only dictate the default assignments; the Owner and Q/A
Contact fields in a bug are otherwise unrelated to the Component.
To create a new Component:
1. Select the "Edit components" link from the "Edit Product" page
2. Select the "Add" link to the right of the "Add a new component"
text on the "Select Component" page.
3. Fill out the "Component" field, a short "Description", and the
"Initial Owner". The "Component" field should not contain a space.
The "Description" field is free-form. The "Initial Owner" field
must be that of a valid user already existing in the database. If
the initial owner does not exist, Bugzilla will refuse to create
the component.
Tip: Is your "Default Owner" a user who is not yet in the database?
No problem.
a. Select the "Log out" link on the footer of the page.
b. Select the "New Account" link on the footer of the "Relogin"
page
c. Type in the email address of the default owner you want to
create in the "E-mail address" field, and her full name in
the "Real name" field, then select the "Submit Query" button.
d. Now select "Log in" again, type in your login information,
and you can modify the product to use the Default Owner
information you require.
4. Either "edit" more components or return to the "query" page on the
ensuing "Addming new component" page. To return to the Product you
were editing, you must select the "components" link as before.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.3. Versions
Versions are the revisions of the product, such as "Flinders 3.1",
"Flinders 95", and "Flinders 2000". Using Versions helps you isolate
code changes and are an aid in reporting.
Example 3-2. Common Use of Versions
A user reports a bug against Version "Beta 2.0" of your product. The
current Version of your software is "Release Candidate 1", and no
longer has the bug. This will help you triage and classify bugs
according to their relevance. It is also possible people may report
bugs against bleeding-edge beta versions that are not evident in older
versions of the software. This can help isolate code changes that
caused the bug
Example 3-3. A Different Use of Versions
This field has been used to good effect by an online service provider
in a slightly different way. They had three versions of the product:
"Production", "QA", and "Dev". Although it may be the same product, a
bug in the development environment is not normally as critical as a
Production bug, nor does it need to be reported publicly. When used in
conjunction with Target Milestones, one can easily specify the
environment where a bug can be reproduced, and the Milestone by which
it will be fixed.
To create and edit Versions:
1. From the "Edit Product" screen, select "Edit Versions"
2. You will notice that the product already has the default version
"undefined". If your product doesn't use version numbers, you may
want to leave this as it is or edit it so that it is "---". You
can then go back to the edit versions page and add new versions to
your product.
Otherwise, click the "Add" button to the right of the "Add a new
version" text.
3. Enter the name of the Version. This can be free-form characters up
to the limit of the text box. Then select the "Add" button.
4. At this point you can select "Edit" to edit more Versions, or
return to the "Query" page, from which you can navigate back to
the product through the "components" link at the foot of the Query
page.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.4. Milestones
Milestones are "targets" that you plan to get a bug fixed by. For
example, you have a bug that you plan to fix for your 3.0 release, it
would be assigned the milestone of 3.0. Or, you have a bug that you
plan to fix for 2.8, this would have a milestone of 2.8.
Note: Milestone options will only appear for a Product if you
turned the "usetargetmilestone" field in the "Edit Parameters"
screen "On".
To create new Milestones, set Default Milestones, and set Milestone
URL:
1. Select "edit milestones"
2. Select "Add" to the right of the "Add a new milestone" text
3. Enter the name of the Milestone in the "Milestone" field. You can
optionally set the "Sortkey", which is a positive or negative
number (-255 to 255) that defines where in the list this
particular milestone appears. Select "Add".
Example 3-4. Using SortKey with Target Milestone
Let's say you create a target milestone called "Release 1.0", with
Sortkey set to "0". Later, you realize that you will have a public
beta, called "Beta1". You can create a Milestone called "Beta1",
with a Sortkey of "-1" in order to ensure people will see the
Target Milestone of "Beta1" earlier on the list than "Release 1.0"
4. If you want to add more milestones, select the "Edit" link. If you
don't, well shoot, you have to go back to the "query" page and
select "components" again, and make your way back to the Product
you were editing.
Note: This is another in the list of unusual user interface
decisions that we'd like to get cleaned up. Shouldn't there be a
link to the effect of "edit the Product I was editing when I ended
up here"? In any case, clicking "components" in the footer takes
you back to the "Select product" screen, from which you can begin
editing your product again.
5. From the Edit Product screen again (once you've made your way
back), enter the URL for a description of what your milestones are
for this product in the "Milestone URL" field. It should be of the
format "http://www.foo.com/bugzilla/product_milestones.html"
Some common uses of this field include product descriptions,
product roadmaps, and of course a simple description of the
meaning of each milestone.
6. If you're using Target Milestones, the "Default Milestone" field
must have some kind of entry. If you really don't care if people
set coherent Target Milestones, simply leave this at the default,
"---". However, controlling and regularly updating the Default
Milestone field is a powerful tool when reporting the status of
projects.
Select the "Update" button when you are done.
7.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.5. Voting
The concept of "voting" is a poorly understood, yet powerful feature
for the management of open-source projects. Each user is assigned so
many Votes per product, which they can freely reassign (or assign
multiple votes to a single bug). This allows developers to gauge user
need for a particular enhancement or bugfix. By allowing bugs with a
certain number of votes to automatically move from "UNCONFIRMED" to
"NEW", users of the bug system can help high-priority bugs garner
attention so they don't sit for a long time awaiting triage.
The daunting challenge of Votes is deciding where you draw the line
for a "vocal majority". If you only have a user base of 100 users,
setting a low threshold for bugs to move from UNCONFIRMED to NEW makes
sense. As the Bugzilla user base expands, however, these thresholds
must be re-evaluated. You should gauge whether this feature is worth
the time and close monitoring involved, and perhaps forego
implementation until you have a critical mass of users who demand it.
To modify Voting settings:
1. Navigate to the "Edit Product" screen for the Product you wish to
modify
2. Set "Maximum Votes per person" to your calculated value. Setting
this field to "0" disables voting.
3. Set "Maximum Votes a person can put on a single bug" to your
calculated value. It should probably be some number lower than the
"Maximum votes per person". Setting this field to "0" disables
voting, but leaves the voting options open to the user. This is
confusing.
4. Set "Number of votes a bug in this product needs to automatically
get out of the UNCONFIRMED state" to your calculated number.
Setting this field to "0" disables the automatic move of bugs from
UNCONFIRMED to NEW. Some people advocate leaving this at "0", but
of what use are Votes if your Bugzilla user base is unable to
affect which bugs appear on Development radar?
Tip: You should probably set this number to higher than a small
coalition of Bugzilla users can influence it. Most sites use this
as a "referendum" mechanism -- if users are able to vote a bug out
of UNCONFIRMED, it is a really bad bug!
5. Once you have adjusted the values to your preference, select the
"Update" button.
_________________________________________________________________
3.3.6. Groups and Group Security
Groups can be very useful in bugzilla, because they allow users to
isolate bugs or products that should only be seen by certain people.
Groups can also be a complicated minefield of interdependencies and
weirdness if mismanaged.
Example 3-5. When to Use Group Security
Many Bugzilla sites isolate "Security-related" bugs from all other
bugs. This way, they can have a fix ready before the security
vulnerability is announced to the world. You can create a "Security"
product which, by default, has no members, and only add members to the
group (in their individual User page, as described under User
Administration) who should have priveleged access to "Security" bugs.
Alternately, you may create a Group independently of any Product, and
change the Group mask on individual bugs to restrict access to members
only of certain Groups.
Groups only work if you enable the "usebuggroups" paramater. In
addition, if the "usebuggroupsentry" parameter is "On", one can
restrict access to products by groups, so that only members of a
product group are able to view bugs within that product. Group
security in Bugzilla can be divided into two categories: Generic and
Product-Based.
Note: Groups in Bugzilla are a complicated beast that evolved out
of very simple user permission bitmasks, apparently itself derived
from common concepts in UNIX access controls. A "bitmask" is a
fixed-length number whose value can describe one, and only one, set
of states. For instance, UNIX file permissions are assigned bitmask
values: "execute" has a value of 1, "write" has a value of 2, and
"read" has a value of 4. Add them together, and a file can be read,
written to, and executed if it has a bitmask of "7". (This is a
simplified example -- anybody who knows UNIX security knows there
is much more to it than this. Please bear with me for the purpose
of this note.) The only way a bitmask scheme can work is by
doubling the bit count for each value. Thus if UNIX wanted to offer
another file permission, the next would have to be a value of 8,
then the next 16, the next 32, etc.
Similarly, Bugzilla offers a bitmask to define group permissions,
with an internal limit of 64. Several are already occupied by
built-in permissions. The way around this limitation is to avoid
assigning groups to products if you have many products, avoid
bloating of group lists, and religiously prune irrelevant groups.
In reality, most installations of Bugzilla support far fewer than
64 groups, so this limitation has not hit for most sites, but it is
on the table to be revised for Bugzilla 3.0 because it interferes
with the security schemes of some administrators.
To enable Generic Group Security ("usebuggroups"):
1. Turn "On" "usebuggroups" in the "Edit Parameters" screen.
2. You will generally have no groups set up. Select the "groups" link
in the footer.
3. Take a moment to understand the instructions on the "Edit Groups"
screen. Once you feel confident you understand what is expected of
you, select the "Add Group" link.
4. Fill out the "New Name" (remember, no spaces!), "New Description",
and "New User RegExp" fields. "New User RegExp" allows you to
automatically place all users who fulfill the Regular Expression
into the new group.
Example 3-6. Creating a New Group
I created a group called "DefaultGroup" with a description of
"This is simply a group to play with", and a "New User RegExp" of
"*@velio.com". This new group automatically includes all Bugzilla
users with "@velio.com" at the end of their user id. When I
finished, my new group was assigned bit #128.
When you have finished, select the "Add" button.
To enable Product-Based Group Security ("usebuggroupsentry"):
Warning
Don't forget that you only have 64 groups masks available, total, for
your installation of Bugzilla! If you plan on having more than 50
products in your individual Bugzilla installation, and require group
security for your products, you should consider either running
multiple Bugzillas or using Generic Group Security instead of
Product-Based ("usebuggroupsentry") Group Security.
1. Turn "On" "usebuggroups" and "usebuggroupsentry" in the "Edit
Parameters" screen.
Warning
"usebuggroupsentry" has the capacity to prevent the administrative
user from directly altering bugs because of conflicting group
permissions. If you plan on using "usebuggroupsentry", you should plan
on restricting administrative account usage to administrative duties
only. In other words, manage bugs with an unpriveleged user account,
and manage users, groups, Products, etc. with the administrative
account.
2. You will generally have no Groups set up, unless you enabled
"usebuggroupsentry" prior to creating any Products. To create
"Generic Group Security" groups, follow the instructions given
above. To create Product-Based Group security, simply follow the
instructions for creating a new Product. If you need to add users
to these new groups as you create them, you will find the option
to add them to the group available under the "Edit User" screens.
_________________________________________________________________
3.4. Bugzilla Security
Putting your money in a wall safe is better protection than depending
on the fact that no one knows that you hide your money in a mayonnaise
jar in your fridge.
Note: Poorly-configured MySQL, Bugzilla, and FTP installations have
given attackers full access to systems in the past. Please take
these guidelines seriously, even for Bugzilla machines hidden away
behind your firewall. 80% of all computer trespassers are insiders,
not anonymous crackers.
First thing's first: Secure your installation.
Note: These instructions must, of necessity, be somewhat vague
since Bugzilla runs on so many different platforms. If you have
refinements of these directions for specific platforms, please
submit them to mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org
1. Ensure you are running at least MysQL version 3.22.32 or newer.
Earlier versions had notable security holes and poorly secured
default configuration choices.
2. There is no substitute for understanding the tools on your system!
Read The MySQL Privelege System until you can recite it from
memory!
At the very least, ensure you password the "mysql -u root" account
and the "bugs" account, establish grant table rights (consult the
Keystone guide in Appendix C: The Bugzilla Database for some
easy-to-use details) that do not allow CREATE, DROP, RELOAD,
SHUTDOWN, and PROCESS for user "bugs". I wrote up the Keystone
advice back when I knew far less about security than I do now : )
3. Lock down /etc/inetd.conf. Heck, disable inet entirely on this
box. It should only listen to port 25 for Sendmail and port 80 for
Apache.
4. Do not run Apache as "nobody". This will require very lax
permissions in your Bugzilla directories. Run it, instead, as a
user with a name, set via your httpd.conf file.
5. Ensure you have adequate access controls for the
$BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ and $BUGZILLA_HOME/shadow/ directories, as
well as the $BUGZILLA_HOME/localconfig and
$BUGZILLA_HOME/globals.pl files. The localconfig file stores your
"bugs" user password, which would be terrible to have in the hands
of a criminal, while the "globals.pl" stores some default
information regarding your installation which could aid a system
cracker. In addition, some files under $BUGZILLA_HOME/data/ store
sensitive information, and $BUGZILLA_HOME/shadow/ stores bug
information for faster retrieval. If you fail to secure these
directories and this file, you will expose bug information to
those who may not be allowed to see it.
Note: Bugzilla provides default .htaccess files to protect the most
common Apache installations. However, you should verify these are
adequate according to the site-wide security policy of your web
server, and ensure that the .htaccess files are allowed to
"override" default permissions set in your Apache configuration
files. Covering Apache security is beyond the scope of this Guide;
please consult the Apache documentation for details.
If you are using a web server that does not support the .htaccess
control method, you are at risk! After installing, check to see if
you can view the file "localconfig" in your web browser (ergo:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/localconfig. If you can read the
contents of this file, your web server has not secured your
bugzilla directory properly and you must fix this problem before
deploying Bugzilla. If, however, it gives you a "Forbidden" error,
then it probably respects the .htaccess conventions and you are
good to go.
On Apache, you can use .htaccess files to protect access to these
directories, as outlined in Bug 57161 for the localconfig file,
and Bug 65572 for adequate protection in your data/ and shadow/
directories.
Note the instructions which follow are Apache-specific. If you use
IIS, Netscape, or other non-Apache web servers, please consult
your system documentation for how to secure these files from being
transmitted to curious users.
Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess", readable
by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/data directory.
<Files comments>
allow from all
</Files>
deny from all
Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess", readable
by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/ directory.
<Files localconfig>
deny from all
</Files>
allow from all
Place the following text into a file named ".htaccess", readable
by your web server, in your $BUGZILLA_HOME/shadow directory.
deny from all
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 4. Using Bugzilla
What, Why, How, & What's in it for me?
_________________________________________________________________
4.1. What is Bugzilla?
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.
Bugzilla has matured immensely, and now boasts many advanced features.
These include:
* integrated, product-based granular security schema
* inter-bug dependencies and dependency graphing
* advanced reporting capabilities
* a robust, stable RDBMS back-end
* extensive configurability
* a very well-understood and well-thought-out natural bug resolution
protocol
* email, XML, and HTTP APIs
* available integration with automated software configuration
management systems, including Perforce and CVS.
* too many more features to list
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.
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".
Despite these small problems, Bugzilla is very hard to beat. It is
under very 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.
_________________________________________________________________
4.2. Why Should We Use Bugzilla?
No, Who's on first...
For many years, defect-tracking software has remained principally the
domain of large software development houses. Even then, most shops
never bothered with bug-tracking software, and instead simply relied
on shared lists and email to monitor the status of defects. This
procedure is error-prone and tends to cause those bugs judged least
significant by developers to be dropped or ignored
These days, many companies are finding that integrated defect-tracking
systems reduce downtime, increase productivity, and raise customer
satisfaction with their systems. Along with full disclosure, an open
bug-tracker allows manufacturers to keep in touch with their clients
and resellers, to communicate about problems effectively throughout
the data management chain. Many corporations have also discovered that
defect-tracking helps reduce costs by providing IT support
accountability, telephone support knowledge bases, and a common,
well-understood system for accounting for unusual system or software
issues.
But why should you use Bugzilla?
Bugzilla is very adaptable to various situations. Known uses currently
include IT support queues, Systems Administration deployment
management, chip design and development problem tracking (both
pre-and-post fabrication), and software and hardware bug tracking for
luminaries such as Redhat, Loki software, Linux-Mandrake, and VA
Systems. Combined with systems such as CVS, Bonsai, or Perforce SCM,
Bugzilla provides a powerful, easy-to-use solution to configuration
management and replication problems
Bugzilla can dramatically increase the productivity and accountability
of individual employees by providing a documented workflow and
positive feedback for good performance. How many times do you wake up
in the morning, remembering that you were supposed to do *something*
today, but you just can't quite remember? Put it in Bugzilla, and you
have a record of it from which you can extrapolate milestones, predict
product versions for integration, and by using Bugzilla's e-mail
integration features be able to follow the discussion trail that led
to critical decisions.
Ultimately, Bugzilla puts the power in your hands to improve your
value to your employer or business while providing a usable framework
for your natural attention to detail and knowledge store to flourish.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3. How do I use Bugzilla?
Hey! I'm Woody! Howdy, Howdy, Howdy!
Bugzilla is a large, complex system. Describing how to use it requires
some time. If you are only interested in installing or administering a
Bugzilla installation, please consult the Installing and Administering
Bugzilla portions of this Guide. This section is principally aimed
towards developing end-user mastery of Bugzilla, so you may fully
enjoy the benefits afforded by using this reliable open-source
bug-tracking software.
Throughout this portion of the Guide, we will refer to user account
options available at the Bugzilla test installation,
landfill.tequilarista.org.
Note: Some people have run into difficulties completing this
tutorial. If you run into problems, please check the updated,
online documentation available at
http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons. If you're still stumped, please
subscribe to the newsgroup and provide details of exactly what's
stumping you! If enough people complain, I'll have to fix it in the
next version of this Guide. You can subscribe to the newsgroup at
news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.webtools
Although Landfill serves as a great introduction to Bugzilla, it does
not offer all the options you would have as a user on your own
installation of Bugzilla, nor can it do more than serve as a general
introduction to Bugzilla. Additionally, Landfill often runs
cutting-edge versions of Bugzilla for testing, so some things may work
slightly differently than mentioned here.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.1. Create a Bugzilla Account
First thing's first! 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 the end-user Bugzilla experience, use this URL:
http://landfill.tequilarista.org/mozilla/bugzilla/
1. Click the "Open a new Bugzilla account" link.
2. Enter your "E-mail address" and "Real Name" (or whatever name you
want to call yourself) in the spaces provided, then select the
"Create Account" button.
3. Within 5-10 minutes, you should receive an email to the address
you provided above, which contains your login name (generally the
same as the email address), and a password you can use to access
your account. This password is randomly generated, and should be
changed at your nearest opportunity (we'll go into how to do it
later).
4. Click the "Log In" link in the yellow area at the bottom of the
page in your browser, then enter your "E-mail address" and
"Password" you just received into the spaces provided, and select
"Login".
Note: If you ever forget your password, you can come back to this
page, enter your "E-mail address", then select the "E-mail me a
password" button to have your password mailed to you again so that
you can login.
Caution
Many modern browsers include an "Auto-Complete" or "Form Fill" feature
to remember the user names and passwords you type in at many sites.
Unfortunately, sometimes they attempt to "guess" what you will put in
as your password, and guess wrong. If you notice a text box is already
filled out, please overwrite the contents of the text box so you can
be sure to input the correct information.
Congratulations! If you followed these directions, you now are the
proud owner of a user account on landfill.tequilarista.org (Landfill)
or your local Bugzilla install. You should now see in your browser a
page called the "Bugzilla Query Page". It may look daunting, but with
this Guide to walk you through it, you will master it in no time.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.2. The Bugzilla Query Page
The Bugzilla Query Page is the heart and soul of Bugzilla. It is the
master interface where you can find any bug report, comment, or patch
currently in the Bugzilla system. We'll go into how to create your own
bug report later on.
There are efforts underway to simplify query usage. If you have a
local installation of Bugzilla 2.12 or higher, you should have
"quicksearch.html" available to use and simplify your searches. There
is also, or shortly will be, a helper for the query interface, called
"queryhelp.cgi". Landfill tends to run the latest code, so these two
utilities should be available there for your perusal.
At this point, please visit the main Bugzilla site,
bugzilla.mozilla.org, to see a more fleshed-out query page.
The first thing you need to notice about the Bugzilla Query Page is
that nearly every box you see on your screen has a hyperlink nearby,
explaining what it is or what it does. Near the upper-left-hand corner
of your browser window you should see the word "Status" underlined.
Select it.
Notice the page that popped up? Every underlined word you see on your
screen is a hyperlink that will take you to context-sensitive help.
Click around for a while, and learn what everything here does. To
return to the query interface after pulling up a help page, use the
"Back" button in your browser.
I'm sure that after checking out the online help, you are now an
Expert on the Bugzilla Query Page. If, however, you feel you haven't
mastered it yet, let me walk you through making a few successful
queries to find out what there are in the Bugzilla bug-tracking system
itself.
1. Ensure you are back on the "Bugzilla Query Page" Do nothing in the
boxes marked "Status", "Resolution", "Platform", "OpSys",
"Priority", or "Severity". The default query for "Status" is to
find all bugs that are NEW, ASSIGNED, or REOPENED, which is what
we want. If you don't select anything in the other 5 scrollboxes
there, then you are saying that "any of these are OK"; we're not
locking ourselves into only finding bugs on the "DEC" Platform, or
"Windows 95" OpSys (Operating System). You're smart, I think you
have it figured out.
Basically, selecting anything on the query page narrows your
search down. Leaving stuff unselected, or text boxes unfilled,
broadens your search!
2. You see the box immediately below the top six boxes that contains
an "Email" text box, with the words "matching as", a drop-down
selection box, then some checkboxes with "Assigned To" checked by
default? This allows you to filter your search down based upon
email address. Let's put my email address in there, and see what
happens.
Type "barnboy@trilobyte.net" in the top Email text box.
3. Let's narrow the search some more. Scroll down until you find the
box with the word "Program" over the top of it. This is where we
can narrow our search down to only specific products (software
programs or product lines) in our Bugzilla database. Please notice
the box is a scrollbox. Using the down arrow on the scrollbox,
scroll down until you can see an entry called "Webtools". Select
this entry.
4. Did you notice that some of the boxes to the right changed when
you selected "Webtools"? Every Program (or Product) has different
Versions, Components, and Target Milestones associated with it. A
"Version" is the number of a software program.
Example 4-1. Some Famous Software Versions
Do you remember the hype in 1995 when Microsoft Windows 95(r) was
released? It may have been several years ago, but Microsoft(tm)
spent over $300 Million advertising this new Version of their
software. Three years later, they released Microsoft Windows
98(r), another new version, to great fanfare, and then in 2000
quietly released Microsoft Windows ME(Millenium Edition)(r).
Software "Versions" help a manufacturer differentiate their
current product from their previous products. Most do not identify
their products by the year they were released. Instead, the
"original" version of their software will often be numbered "1.0",
with small bug-fix releases on subsequent tenths of a digit. In
most cases, it's not a decimal number; for instance, often 1.9 is
an older version of the software than 1.11, but is a newer version
than 1.1.1.
In general, a "Version" in Bugzilla should refer to released
products, not products that have not yet been released to the
public. Forthcoming products are what the Target Milestone field
is for.
A "Component" is a piece of a Product. It may be a standalone
program, or some other logical division of a Product or Program.
Normally, a Component has a single Owner, who is responsible for
overseeing efforts to improve that Component.
Example 4-2. Mozilla Webtools Components
Mozilla's "Webtools" Product is composed of several pieces
(Components):
Bonsai, a tool to show recent changes to Mozilla
Bugzilla, a defect-tracking tool
Build, a tool to automatically compile source code into
machine-readable form
Despot, a program that controls access to the other Webtools
LXR, a utility that automatically marks up text files to make them
more readable
MozBot, a "robot" that announces changes to Mozilla in Chat
TestManager, a tool to help find bugs in Mozilla
Tinderbox, which displays reports from Build
A different person is responsible for each of these Components.
Tara Hernandez keeps the "Bugzilla" component up-to-date.
A "Milestone", or "Target Milestone" is a often a planned future
"Version" of a product. In many cases, though, Milestones simply
represent significant dates for a developer. Having certain
features in your Product is frequently tied to revenue (money) the
developer will receive if the features work by the time she
reaches the Target Milestone. Target Milestones are a great tool
to organize your time. If someone will pay you $100,000 for
incorporating certain features by a certain date, those features
by that Milestone date become a very high priority. Milestones
tend to be highly malleable creatures, though, that appear to be
in reach but are out of reach by the time the important day
arrives.
The Bugzilla Project has set up Milestones for future Bugzilla
versions 2.14, 2.16, 2.18, 3.0, etc. However, a Target Milestone
can just as easily be a specific date, code name, or weird
alphanumeric combination, like "M19".
5. OK, now let's select the "Bugzilla" component from its scrollbox.
6. Skip down the page a bit -- do you see the "submit query" button?
Select it, and let's run this query!
7. Congratulations! You've completed your first Query, and have
before you the Bug List of the author of this Guide, Matthew P.
Barnson (barnboy@trilobyte.net). If I'm doing well, you'll have a
cryptic "Zarro Boogs Found" message on your screen. It is just a
happy hacker's way of saying "Zero Bugs Found". However, I am
fairly certain I will always have some bugs assigned to me that
aren't done yet, so you won't often see that message!
I encourage you to click the bug numbers in the left-hand column and
examine my bugs. Also notice that if you click the underlined links
near the top of this page, they do not take you to context-sensitive
help here, but instead sort the columns of bugs on the screen! When
you need to sort your bugs by priority, severity, or the people they
are assigned to, this is a tremendous timesaver.
A couple more interesting things about the Bug List page:
Change Columns: by selecting this link, you can show all kinds of
information in the Bug List
Change several bugs at once: If you have sufficient rights to change
all the bugs shown in the Bug List, you can mass-modify them. This is
a big time-saver.
Send mail to bug owners: If you have many related bugs, you can
request an update from every person who owns the bugs in the Bug List
asking them the status.
Edit this query: 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.
Note: There are many more options to the Bugzilla Query Page and
the Bug List than I have shown you. But this should be enough for
you to learn to get around. I encourage you to check out the
Bugzilla Home Page to learn about the Anatomy and Life Cycle of a
Bug before continuing.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.3. Creating and Managing Bug Reports
And all this time, I thought we were taking bugs out...
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.3.1. Writing a Great Bug Report
Before we plunge into writing your first bug report, I encourage you
to read Mozilla.org's 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.
While you are at it, why not learn how to find previously reported
bugs? Mozilla.org has published a great tutorial on finding duplicate
bugs, available at
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/beginning-duplicate-finding.html.
I realize this was a lot to read. However, understanding the mentality
of writing great bug reports will help us on the next part!
1. Go back to http://landfill.tequilarista.org/mozilla/bugzilla/ in
your browser.
2. Select the Enter a new bug report link.
3. Select a product.
4. Now you should be at the "Enter Bug" form. The "reporter" should
have been automatically filled out for you (or else Bugzilla
prompted you to Log In again -- you did keep the email with your
username and password, didn't you?).
5. Select a Component in the scrollbox.
6. Bugzilla should have made reasonable guesses, based upon your
browser, for the "Platform" and "OS" drop-down boxes. If those are
wrong, change them -- if you're on an SGI box running IRIX, we
want to know!
7. Fill in the "Assigned To" box with the email address you provided
earlier. This way you don't end up sending copies of your bug to
lots of other people, since it's just a test bug.
8. Leave the "CC" text box blank. Fill in the "URL" box with
"http://www.mozilla.org".
9. Enter "The Bugzilla Guide" in the Summary text box, and place any
comments you have on this tutorial, or the Guide in general, into
the Description box.
Voila! Select "Commit" and send in your bug report! Next we'll look at
resolving bugs.
_________________________________________________________________
4.3.3.2. Managing your Bug Reports
OK, you should have a link to the bug you just created near the top of
your page. It should say "Bug XXXX posted", with a link to the right
saying "Back to BUG# XXXX". Select this link.
1. Scroll down a bit on the subsequent page, until you see the
"Resolve bug, changing resolution to (dropdown box). Normally, you
would "Accept bug (change status to ASSIGNED)", fix it, and then
resolve. But in this case, we're going to short-circuit the
process because this wasn't a real bug. Change the dropdown next
to "Resolve Bug" to "INVALID", make sure the radio button is
marked next to "Resolve Bug", then click "Commit".
2. Hey! It said it couldn't take the change in a big red box! That's
right, you must specify a Comment in order to make this change.
Select the "Back" button in your browser, add a Comment, then try
Resolving the bug with INVALID status again. This time it should
work.
You have now learned the basics of Bugzilla navigation, entering a
bug, and bug maintenance. I encourage you to explore these features,
and see what you can do with them! We'll spend no more time on
individual Bugs or Queries from this point on, so you are on your own
there.
But I'll give a few last hints!
There is a CLUE on the Query page that will teach you more how to use
the form.
If you click the hyperlink on the Component box of the Query page, you
will be presented a form that will describe what all the components
are.
Possibly the most powerful feature of the Query page is the Boolean
Chart section. It's a bit confusing to use the first time, but can
provide unparalleled flexibility in your queries, allowing you to
build extremely powerful requests.
Finally, you can build some nifty Reports using the "Bug Reports" link
near the bottom of the query page, and also available via the
"Reports" link at the footer of each page.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4. What's in it for me?
Indiana, it feels like we walking on fortune cookies!
These ain't fortune cookies, kid...
Customized User Preferences offer tremendous versatility to your
individual Bugzilla experience. Let's plunge into what you can do! The
first step is to click the "Edit prefs" link at the footer of each
page once you have logged in to Landfill.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.1. Account Settings
On this page, you can change your basic Account Settings, including
your password and full name. For security reasons, in order to change
anything on this page you must type your current password into the
"Old Password" field. If you wish to change your password, type the
new password you want into the "New Password" field and again into the
"Re-enter new password" field to ensure you typed your new password
correctly. Select the "Submit" button and you're done!
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.2. Email Settings
4.4.2.1. Email Notification
Note: The email notification settings described below have been
obsoleted in Bugzilla 2.12, and this section will be replaced with
a comprehensive description of the amazing array of new options at
your disposal. However, in the meantime, throw this chunk out the
window and go crazy with goofing around with different notification
options.
Ahh, here you can reduce or increase the amount of email sent you from
Bugzilla! In the drop-down "Notify me of changes to", select one of
All qualifying bugs: sends you every change to every bug where your
name is somewhere on it, regardless of who changed it.
Only those bugs which I am listed in the CC line: prevents you from
receiving mail for which you are the reporter,' owner, or QA contact.
If you are on the CC list, presumably someone had a good reason for
you to get the email.
All qulifying bugs except those which I change: This is the default,
and a sensible setting. If someone else changes your bugs, you will
get emailed, but if you change bugs yourself you will receive no
notification of the change.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.2.2. New Email Technology
Note: This option may not be available in all Bugzilla
installations, depending upon the preferences of the systems
administrator responsible for the setup of your Bugzilla. However,
if you really want this functionality, ask her to "enable
newemailtech in Params" and "make it the default for all new
users", referring her to the Administration section of this Guide.
Disregard the warnings about "experimental and bleeding edge"; the
code to handle email in a cleaner manner than that historically used
for Bugzilla is quite robust and well-tested now.
I recommend you enable the option, "Click here to sign up (and risk
any bugs)". Your email-box will thank you for it. The fundamental
shift in "newemailtech" is away from standard UNIX "diff" output,
which is quite ugly, to a prettier, better laid-out email.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.2.3. "Watching" Users
Note: This option may not be available in all Bugzilla
installations, depending upon the preferences of the systems
administrator responsible for the setup of your Bugzilla. However,
if you really want this functionality, ask her to "enable watchers
in Params".
By entering user email names into the "Users to watch" text entry box,
delineated by commas, you can watch bugs of other users. This powerful
functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change
projects, managers wish to get in touch with the issues faced by their
direct reports, or users go on vacation. If any of these three
situations apply to you, you will undoubtedly find this feature quite
convenient.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.3. Page Footer
Note: By default, this page is quite barren. However, go explore
the Query Page some more; you will find that you can store numerous
queries on the server, so if you regularly run a particular query
it is just a drop-down menu away. On this page of Preferences, if
you have many stored queries you can elect to have them always
one-click away!
If you have many stored queries on the server, here you will find
individual drop-downs for each stored query. Each drop-down gives you
the option of that query appearing on the footer of every page in
Bugzilla! This gives you powerful one-click access to any complex
searches you may set up, and is an excellent way to impress your
boss...
Tip: By default, the "My Bugs" link appears at the bottom of each
page. However, this query gives you both the bugs you have
reported, as well as those you are assigned. One of the most common
uses for this page is to remove the "My Bugs" link, replacing it
with two other queries, commonly called "My Bug Reports" and "My
Bugs" (but only referencing bugs assigned to you). This allows you
to distinguish those bugs you have reported from those you are
assigned. I commonly set up complex Boolean queries in the Query
page and link them to my footer in this page. When they are
significantly complex, a one-click reference can save hours of
work.
_________________________________________________________________
4.4.4. Permissions
This is a purely informative page which outlines your current
permissions on this installation of Bugzilla. If you have permissions
to grant certain permissions to other users, the "other users" link
appears on this page as well as the footer. For more information
regarding user administration, please consult the Administration
section of this Guide.
_________________________________________________________________
4.5. Using Bugzilla-Conclusion
Thank you for reading through this portion of the Bugzilla Guide. I
anticipate it may not yet meet the needs of all readers. If you have
additional comments or corrections to make, please submit your
contributions to the mozilla-webtools mailing list/newsgroup. The
mailing list is mirrored to the netscape.public.mozilla.webtools
newsgroup, and the newsgroup is mirrored to
mozilla-webtools@mozilla.org
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 5. Integrating Bugzilla with Third-Party Tools
5.1. Bonsai
We need Bonsai integration information.
_________________________________________________________________
5.2. CVS
We need CVS integration information
_________________________________________________________________
5.3. Perforce SCM
Richard Brooksby created a Perforce integration tool for Bugzilla and
TeamTrack. You can find the main project page at
http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/p4dti. "p4dti" is now an officially
supported product from Perforce, and you can find the "Perforce Public
Depot" p4dti page at
http://public.perforce.com/public/perforce/p4dti/index.html.
Integration of Perforce with Bugzilla, once patches are applied, is
fairly seamless. However, p4dti is a patch against the Bugzilla 2.10
release, not the current 2.12 release. I anticipate patches for 2.12
will be out shortly. Check the project page regularly for updates, or
take the given patches and patch it manually. p4dti is designed to
support multiple defect trackers, and maintains its own documentation
for it. Please consult the pages linked above for further information.
Right now, there is no way to synchronize the Bug ID and the Perforce
Transaction Number, or to change the Bug ID to read (PRODUCT).bugID
unless you hack it in. Additionally, if you have synchronization
problems, the easiest way to avoid them is to only put the bug
information, comments, etc. into Bugzilla, and not into the Perforce
change records. They will link anyway; merely reference the bug ID
fixed in your change description, and put a comment into Bugzilla
giving the change ID that fixed the Bugzilla bug. It's a process
issue, not a technology question.
_________________________________________________________________
5.4. Tinderbox
We need Tinderbox integration information
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 6. The Future of Bugzilla
Bugzilla's Future. Much of this is the present, now.
_________________________________________________________________
6.1. Reducing Spam
Those who use Bugzilla frequently are probably used to notification sp
am
- unwanted or unnecessary notifications. A number of proposals have
been put forward to attempt to reduce this.
1. Reduce CC Spam
Some of you probably know me as that guy who CCs on heaps and heaps of
bugs. Just as you get a lot of CC changes from me, so do I get a lot
from others. Why should CC changes send out email notifications?
It's not necessarily the best idea to just remove the CC spam, there a
re
other issues too, like the difficulty of adding to large CC fields.
For these reasons and more, an RFE for a per user "BCC" facility exist
s
that people could use to silently and privately track bugs, in a simil
ar
way to voting today, but applying to an unlimited number of bugs. See
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7345".
2. Bulk Changes
You know the drill - a large milestone change, a component movement,
whatever, and lots of notifications are generated. If there's enough
maybe you'll just go delete, delete, delete, whoops, there goes anothe
r
notification that wasn't from the bulk change you missed.
Shouldn't bulk changes send out one notification? A proposal for this
is at "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26943".
3. Configurable Notification Criteria
It would be good if you could choose what you want to receive. There
are two parts to this.
(a) Choose a selection of bugs you're interested in. This would be
similar to CC except you let the set be computed from selection criter
ia
rather than limited to the bugs your name is on. There is currently a
limited version of this in the bugzilla preferences, ie "all qualifyin
g
bugs"/"all qualifying bugs except the ones I change"/"only those bugs
which I am listed on the cc line".
(b) Choose what changes will trigger a notification for the bugs you a
re
watching. With this, you could choose whether you want to receive cc,
dependency and keyword changes, for example.
Both of these proposals live at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14137".
Note that they also live at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17464", and the change
has been checked in. This is fixed with Bugzilla 2.12 and is no longe
r
an issue. Woo-Hoo!
_________________________________________________________________
6.2. Better Searching
Current searching tools in Bugzilla include the querying mechanism,
special summary reports and dependency trees. This message is about n
ew
facilities.
1. General Summary Reports
For some time now it has been apparent to me that the query bug list
leaves a little to be desired in its linear nature. There is a need t
o
have categorised subsets, and counts of each category. If you don't
believe me, how about these facilities already in place or which peopl
e
have asked for:
Most Doomed Reports - Categorised On Assignee, Shows and Counts Number
of Bugs For Each Assignee
Bug #15806 (Most Voted For Bugs) - Categorised On Product, Shows Bugs
Voters Most Want Fixed
Bug #9789 (BugAThon Tracking Page) - Categorised On Developer (Subset)
,
Counts Number of Bugs
Bug #9409 and #9411 - The desire to be able to report on more subsets.
Hopefully you can see the gist of what is desired here. It's a genera
l
reporting mechanism.
This mechanism lets you choose the subset of bugs to operate on (like
query), let's you categorise them, possibly along with subcategories a
nd
counts the number of bugs within each category. It might or might not
show the actual bugs themselves, and it might limit the number of bugs
within a category, or categories to report on.
I'm further sure that many applications of this mechanism would only b
e
recognised once it was implemented.
The general summary reports bug is at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12282".
2. Related Bugs
It would be nice to have a field where you could enter other bugs
related to the current bug - it would be handy for navigation and
possibly even finding duplicates. See
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12286".
3. Column Specification Support
Currently query seems to get what columns to report on from whatever t
he
user last used. This doesn't work well for "prepackaged queries", whe
re
you followed a link. You can probably add a column by specifying a so
rt
column, but this is difficult and suboptimal.
Furthermore, I find that when I want to add a column to a query, it's
usually a one off and I would prefer it to go away for the next query.
Hence, it would be nice to specify the columns that appear on the quer
y
(and general summary report) pages. The default query mechanism shoul
d
be able to let you specify your default columns.
This proposal lives at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12284".
_________________________________________________________________
6.3. Description Flags and Tracking Bugs
Since I last posted on this issue, we now have "keywords" that solve
many of the issues of description and status whiteboard keywords. We
have seen a migration towards keywords, but there is still further to
go.
Description ( + Status Whiteboard ) Keywords
--------------------------------------------
Some description keywords remain. I'd like to hear what reasons, othe
r
than time, there are for these staying as they are. I'm suspecting ma
ny
are not really being used. Hopefully we can totally remove these
eventually.
Tracking Bugs
-------------
When I suggested keywords, I did so to get rid of tracking bugs too,
though we've had less success on that front.
There are many disadvantages to tracking bugs.
- They can pollute bugs counts, and you must make sure you exclude
them. I believe the meta keyword might be used for this purpose.
- They have an assignee but there is nothing to fix, and that person c
an
get whined at by Bugzilla.
- It would be better to craft your own "dependency tree" rather than
rely on a fixed hierachy in the bug system.
- In creating a nice little hierachy, many bugs duplicate information
that should be available in other ways, eg
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12833" which is
about beta 1 networking issues. These could fall behind the actual
data. What tracking bugs are good for, ad hoc lists, is what keywords
are better for.
- An automatically generated dependency structure between one "trackin
g
bug" and another would be better than a manual one, since it gives exa
ct
rather than manually set up classifications.
Probably the only feature preventing tracking bugs being replaced is t
he
dependency tree. The quintessential tracking bug seems to be bug #722
9
"chofmann's watch list", which probably has about a couple of hundred
bugs at various levels, which allows a nice visualisation.
Before keywords can replace tracking bugs better visualisation is goin
g
to be required. General summary reports and dependency forests of a b
ug
list ("http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12992") could both
help, but neither solves the problem totally. Perhaps keywords within
keywords would help here. In any case, I'm still thinking about this
one.
Some tracking bugs could definitely be turned into keywords immediatel
y
though, and I'll point the finger at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7954" here since that's
what came to mind first.
_________________________________________________________________
6.4. Bug Issues
1. Inline Bug Changes
Why do I see so many "moving to M5" and "reassigning to blahblah"
messages, and in other circumstances none are entered? Why aren't the
se
automatically generated? A comment should be only necessary when ther
e
is something to add, and if I'm not interested in this sort of
information, I should be able to hide it.
At the moment we're in a hybrid world where we don't get everything, b
ut
we can't get rid of the bug change "messages" either. Furthermore,
"View Bug Activity" requires me to manually cross reference events on
another page, rather than being able to visually see the chronological
order. Shouldn't I be able to see all the information on one page?
A proposal to allow bugs to be shown either way is at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11368".
2. Hard Wrapping Comments
One thing that annoys me is the fact that comments are "hard wrapped"
to
a certain column width. This is a mistake Internet Mail and News has
made, unlike every word processor in existence, and as a consequence,
Usenet suffers to this day from bad software. Why has Bugzilla repeat
ed
the problem?
Hard wrapping to a certain column width is open to abuse (see old
Mozilla browsers that didn't wrap properly, resulting in many ugly bug
reports we have to read to this day), and furthermore doesn't expand t
o
fill greater screen sizes. I'm also under the impression the current
hard wrap uses a non-standard HTML facility. See
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11901".
3. REMIND and LATER Are Evil
I really hate REMIND and LATER. Not because they mean something
won't be implemented, but because they aren't the best solutions.
Why are they bad? Well, basically because they are not resolved, yet
they are marked as such. Hence queries have to be well crafted to
include them.
LATER, according to Bugzilla, means it won't be done this release.
There is a better mechanism of doing this, that is assigning to
nobody@mozilla.org and making the milestone blank. It's more likely t
o
appear in a casual query, and it doesn't resolve the bug.
REMIND, according to Bugzilla, means it might still be implemented thi
s
release. Well, why not just move it to a later milestone then? You'r
e
a lot less likely to forget it. If it's really needed, a keyword woul
d
be better.
Some people can't use blank milestones to mean an untargetted mileston
e,
since they use this to assess new bugs that have no target. Hence, it
would be nice to distinguish between bugs that have not yet been
considered, and those that really are not assigned to any milestone in
the future (assumedly beyond).
All this is covered at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13534".
4. Create An Enhancement Field
Currently enhancement is an option in severity. This means that
important enhancements (like for example, POP3 support) are not proper
ly
distinguished as such, because they need a proper severity. This
dilutes the meaning of enhancement.
If enhancement was separated, we could properly see what was an
enhancement. See "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9412".
I
see keywords like [RFE] and [FEATURE] that seem to be compensating for
this problem.
_________________________________________________________________
6.5. Database Integrity
Bugzilla could be more proactive in detecting suboptimal situations an
d
prevent them or whine about them.
1. Bugzilla Crime #1: Marking A Bug Fixed With Unresolved Dependencies
It can't be marked fixed with unresolved dependencies. Either mark it
INVALID (tracking bugs), fix the dependencies at the same time, or
resolve the blockers.
See "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24496".
2. Keyword Restrictions
Some keywords should only apply in certain circumstances, eg beta1 =>
Milestone <
M14, css1 => Component = Style System are possibilities. See
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26940".
3. Whine About Old Votes
Old votes can just sit on resolved bugs. This is problematic with
duplicates especially. Automatic transferral/removal is not
appropriate since bugs can be reopened, but a whining solution might
work. See "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27553".
4. Whine And Warn About Milestone Mismatches
Here's a fun one. Bug X (M17) depends on Bug Y (M15). Bug Y gets mov
ed
out to M19. The notification to the assignee of Bug X gets ignored (o
f
course) and Bug X is now due to be fixed before one of its blockers.
Warnings about this when it is detected as well as whining about it in
email would help bring these issues to the attention of people sooner.
Note that this would be less of a problem if we didn't have so many
tracking bugs since they aren't updated that often and often have this
problem.
See "http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16743".
_________________________________________________________________
6.6. Bugzilla 3.0
One day, Bugzilla 3.0 will have lots of cool stuff.
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix A. The Bugzilla FAQ
1. General Questions
A.1.1. Where can I find information about Bugzilla?
A.1.2. What license is Bugzilla distributed under?
A.1.3. How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?
A.1.4. What major companies or projects are currently using
Bugzilla for bug-tracking?
A.1.5. Who maintains Bugzilla?
A.1.6. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking
databases?
A.1.7. How do I change my user name in Bugzilla?
A.1.8. Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or
compatability with this other tracking software?
A.1.9. Why MySQL? I'm interested in seeing Bugzilla run on
Oracle/Sybase/Msql/PostgreSQL/MSSQL?
A.1.10. Why do the scripts say "/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl"
instead of "/usr/bin/perl" or something else?
2. Red Hat Bugzilla
A.2.1. What about Red Hat Bugzilla?
A.2.2. What are the primary benefits of Red Hat Bugzilla?
A.2.3. What's the current status of Red Hat Bugzilla?
3. Loki Bugzilla (AKA Fenris)
A.3.1. What about Loki Bugzilla?
A.3.2. Who maintains Fenris (Loki Bugzilla) now?
A.3.3.
4. Pointy-Haired-Boss Questions
A.4.1. Is Bugzilla web-based or do you have to have specific
software or specific operating system on your machine?
A.4.2. Has anyone you know of already done any Bugzilla
integration with Perforce (SCM software)?
A.4.3. Does Bugzilla allow the user to track multiple projects?
A.4.4. If I am on many projects, and search for all bugs assigned
to me, will Bugzilla list them for me and allow me to
sort by project, severity etc?
A.4.5. Does Bugzilla allow attachments (text, screenshots, urls
etc)? If yes, are there any that are NOT allowed?
A.4.6. Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and
levels? Do we have complete freedom to change the labels
of fields and format of them, and the choice of
acceptable values?
A.4.7. The index.html page doesn't show the footer. It's really
annoying to have to go to the querypage just to check my
"my bugs" link. How do I get a footer on static HTML
pages?
A.4.8. Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics,
graphs, etc? You know, the type of stuff that management
likes to see. :)
A.4.9. Is there email notification and if so, what do you see
when you get an email? Do you see bug number and title or
is it only the number?
A.4.10. Can email notification be set up to send to multiple
people, some on the To List, CC List, BCC List etc?
A.4.11. If there is email notification, do users have to have any
particular type of email application?
A.4.12. If I just wanted to track certain bugs, as they go
through life, can I set it up to alert me via email
whenever that bug changes, whether it be owner, status or
description etc.?
A.4.13. Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If
I had outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug
template, could that template be imported into "matching"
fields? If I wanted to take the results of a query and
export that data to MS Excel, could I do that?
A.4.14. Does Bugzilla allow fields to be added, changed or
deleted? If I want to customize the bug submission form
to meet our needs, can I do that using our terminology?
A.4.15. Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be
used in other countries? Is it localizable?
A.4.16. Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in
Word format? Excel format?
A.4.17. Can a user re-run a report with a new project, same
query?
A.4.18. Can a user modify an existing report and then save it
into another name?
A.4.19. Does Bugzilla have the ability to search by word, phrase,
compound search?
A.4.20. Can the admin person establish separate group and
individual user privileges?
A.4.21. Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is
simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second
person get a notice that the bug is in use or how are
they notified?
A.4.22. Are there any backup features provided?
A.4.23. Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?
A.4.24. What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to
install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of
skills does the person need to have? I need to find out
if we were to go with Bugzilla, what types of individuals
would we need to hire and how much would that cost vs
buying an "Out-of-the-Box" solution.
A.4.25. What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire
people to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this
something that takes hours or weeks to install and a
couple of hours per week to maintain and customize or is
this a multi-week install process, plus a full time job
for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
A.4.26. Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using
Bugzilla? Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies
needed as identified above?
5. Bugzilla Installation
A.5.1. How do I download and install Bugzilla?
A.5.2. How do I install Bugzilla on Windows NT?
A.5.3. Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?
6. Bugzilla Security
A.6.1. How do I completely disable MySQL security if it's giving
me problems (I've followed the instructions in the
README!)?
A.6.2. Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?
A.6.3. I've implemented the security fixes mentioned in Chris
Yeh's security advisory of 5/10/2000 advising not to run
MySQL as root, and am running into problems with MySQL no
longer working correctly.
7. Bugzilla Email
A.7.1. I have a user who doesn't want to receive any more email
from Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this user?
A.7.2. I'm evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don't want it to send
email to anyone but me. How do I do it?
A.7.3. I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something more, or other
than, only new bugs. How do I do it?
A.7.4. I don't like/want to use Procmail to hand mail off to
bug_email.pl. What alternatives do I have?
A.7.5. How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs
via email?
A.7.6. Email takes FOREVER to reach me from bugzilla -- it's
extremely slow. What gives?
A.7.7. How come email never reaches me from bugzilla changes?
8. Bugzilla Database
A.8.1. I've heard Bugzilla can be used with Oracle?
A.8.2. Bugs are missing from queries, but exist in the database
(and I can pull them up by specifying the bug ID). What's
wrong?
A.8.3. I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid
entries. What do I do?
A.8.4. I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?
A.8.5. I try to add myself as a user, but Bugzilla always tells
me my password is wrong.
A.8.6. I think I've set up MySQL permissions correctly, but
bugzilla still can't connect.
A.8.7. How do I synchronize bug information among multiple
different Bugzilla databases?
A.8.8. Why do I get bizarre errors when trying to submit data,
particularly problems with "groupset"?
A.8.9. How come even after I delete bugs, the long descriptions
show up?
9. Bugzilla and Win32
A.9.1. What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32
(Win98+/NT/2K)?
A.9.2. Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?
A.9.3. CGI's are failing with a "something.cgi is not a valid
Windows NT application" error. Why?
A.9.4. Can I have some general instructions on how to make
Bugzilla on Win32 work?
A.9.5. I'm having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being
able to talk to to the database.
10. Bugzilla Usage
A.10.1. The query page is very confusing. Isn't there a simpler
way to query?
A.10.2. I'm confused by the behavior of the "accept" button in
the Show Bug form. Why doesn't it assign the bug to me
when I accept it?
A.10.3. I can't upload anything into the database via the "Create
Attachment" link. What am I doing wrong?
A.10.4. Email submissions to Bugzilla that have attachments end
up asking me to save it as a "cgi" file.
A.10.5. How do I change a keyword in Bugzilla, once some bugs are
using it?
11. Bugzilla Hacking
A.11.1. What bugs are in Bugzilla right now?
A.11.2. How can I change the default priority to a null value?
For instance, have the default priority be "---" instead
of "P2"?
A.11.3. What's the best way to submit patches? What guidelines
should I follow?
1. General Questions
A.1.1. Where can I find information about Bugzilla?
You can stay up-to-date with the latest Bugzilla information at
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/
A.1.2. What license is Bugzilla distributed under?
Bugzilla is covered by the Mozilla Public License. See details at
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/
A.1.3. How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?
www.collab.net offers Bugzilla as part of their standard offering to
large projects. They do have some minimum fees that are pretty hefty,
and generally aren't interested in small projects.
There are several experienced Bugzilla hackers on the mailing
list/newsgroup who are willing to whore themselves out for generous
compensation. Try sending a message to the mailing list asking for a
volunteer.
A.1.4. What major companies or projects are currently using Bugzilla
for bug-tracking?
There are dozens of major comapanies with public Bugzilla sites to
track bugs in their products. A few include:
Netscape/AOL
Mozilla.org
AtHome Corporation
Red Hat Software
Loki Entertainment Software
SuSe Corp
The Horde Project
The Eazel Project
AbiSource
Real Time Enterprises, Inc
Eggheads.org
Strata Software
RockLinux
Creative Labs (makers of SoundBlaster)
The Apache Foundation
The Gnome Foundation
Linux-Mandrake
Suffice to say, there are more than enough huge projects using
Bugzilla that we can safely say it's extremely popular.
A.1.5. Who maintains Bugzilla?
There are many, many contributors from around the world maintaining
Bugzilla. The designated "Maintainer" is Tara Hernandez, with QA
support by Matthew Tuck. Dan Mosedale and Dawn Endico are employees of
Mozilla.org responsible for the installation of Bugzilla there, and
are very frequent code contributors. Terry Weissman originally ported
Bugzilla, but "these days, Terry just hangs around and heckles." The
rest of us are mostly transient developers; Bugzilla suits our needs,
and we contribute code as we have needs for updates.
A.1.6. How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking
databases?
A year has gone by, and I still can't find any head-to-head
comparisons of Bugzilla against other defect-tracking software.
However, from my personal experience with other bug-trackers, Bugzilla
offers superior performance on commodity hardware, better price
(free!), more developer- friendly features (such as stored queries,
email integration, and platform independence), improved scalability,
open source code, greater flexibility, and superior ease-of-use.
If you happen to be a commercial Bugzilla vendor, please step forward
with a rebuttal so I can include it in the FAQ. We're not in pursuit
of Bugzilla ueber alles; we simply love having a powerful, open-source
tool to get our jobs done.
A.1.7. How do I change my user name in Bugzilla?
You can't. However, the administrative account can, by simply opening
your user account in editusers.cgi and changing the login name.
A.1.8. Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or
compatability with this other tracking software?
It may be that the support has not been built yet, or that you have
not yet found it. Bugzilla is making tremendous strides in usability,
customizability, scalability, and user interface. It is widely
considered the most complete and popular open-source bug-tracking
software in existence.
That doesn't mean it can't use improvement! You can help the project
along by either hacking a patch yourself that supports the
functionality you require, or else submitting a "Request for
Enhancement" (RFE) using the bug submission interface at
bugzilla.mozilla.org.
A.1.9. Why MySQL? I'm interested in seeing Bugzilla run on
Oracle/Sybase/Msql/PostgreSQL/MSSQL?
Terry Weissman answers,
You're not the only one. But I am not very interested. I'm not a
real SQL or database person. I just wanted to make a useful tool,
and build it on top of free software. So, I picked MySQL, and
learned SQL by staring at the MySQL manual and some code lying
around here, and wrote Bugzilla. I didn't know that Enum's were
non-standard SQL. I'm not sure if I would have cared, but I didn't
even know. So, to me, things are "portable" because it uses MySQL,
and MySQL is portable enough. I fully understand (now) that people
want to be portable to other databases, but that's never been a
real concern of mine.
Things aren't quite that grim these days, however. Terry pretty much
sums up much of the thinking many of us have for Bugzilla, but there
is light on the horizon for database-independence! Here are some
options:
Red Hat Bugzilla: Runs a modified Bugzilla 2.8 atop an Oracle
database.
Interzilla: A project to run Bugzilla on Interbase. No code released
yet, however.
Bugzilla 3.0: One of the primary stated goals is multiple database
support.
A.1.10. Why do the scripts say "/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl" instead of
"/usr/bin/perl" or something else?
Mozilla.org uses /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl. The prime rule in making
submissions is "don't break bugzilla.mozilla.org". If it breaks it,
your patch will be reverted faster than you can do a diff.
Here's Terry Weissman's comment, for some historical context:
[This was] purely my own convention. I wanted a place to put a
version of Perl and other tools that was strictly under my control
for the various webtools, and not subject to anyone else. Edit it
to point to whatever you like.
Note: We always recommend that, if possible, you keep the path as
/usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl, and simply add a /usr/bonsaitools and
/usr/bonsaitools/bin directory, then symlink your version of perl
to /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl. This will make upgrading your
Bugzilla much easier in the future.
Obviously, if you do not have root access to your Bugzilla box, our
suggestion is irrelevant.
2. Red Hat Bugzilla
Note: This section is no longer up-to-date. Please see the section
on "Red Hat Bugzilla" under "Variants" in The Bugzilla Guide.
A.2.1. What about Red Hat Bugzilla?
Red Hat Bugzilla is arguably more user-friendly, customizable, and
scalable than stock Bugzilla. Check it out at
http://bugzilla.redhat.com and the sources at
ftp://people.redhat.com/dkl/. They've set their Bugzilla up to work
with Oracle out of the box. Note that Redhat Bugzilla is based upon
the 2.8 Bugzilla tree; Bugzilla has made some tremendous advances
since the 2.8 release. Why not download both Bugzillas to check out
the differences for yourself?
Dave Lawrence, the original Red Hat Bugzilla maintainer, mentions:
Somebody needs to take the ball and run with it. I'm the only
maintainer and am very pressed for time.
If you, or someone you know, has the time and expertise to do the
integration work so main-tree Bugzilla 2.12 and higher integrates the
Red Hat Bugzilla Oracle modifications, please donate your time to
supporting the Bugzilla project.
A.2.2. What are the primary benefits of Red Hat Bugzilla?
Dave Lawrence:
For the record, we are not using any template type implementation
for the cosmetic changes maded to Bugzilla. It is just alot of html
changes in the code itself. I admit I may have gotten a little
carried away with it but the corporate types asked for a more
standardized interface to match up with other projects relating to
Red Hat web sites. A lot of other web based internal tools I am
working on also look like Bugzilla.
I do want to land the changes that I have made to Bugzilla but I
may have to back out a good deal and make a different version of
Red Hat's Bugzilla for checking in to CVS. Especially the cosmetic
changes because it seems they may not fit the general public. I
will do that as soon as I can. I also still do my regular QA
responsibilities along with Bugzilla so time is difficult sometimes
to come by.
There are also a good deal of other changes that were requested by
management for things like support contracts and different
permission groups for making bugs private. Here is a short list of
the major changes that have been made:
1. No enum types. All old enum types are now separate smaller tables.
2. No bit wise operations. Not all databases support this so they
were changed to a more generic way of doing this task
3. Bug reports can only be altered by the reporter, assignee, or a
privileged bugzilla user. The rest of the world can see the bug
but in a non-changeable format (unless the bug has been marked
private). They can however add comments, add and remove themselves
from the CC list
4. Different group scheme. Each group has an id number related to it.
There is a user_group table which contains userid to groupid
mappings to determine which groups each user belongs to.
Additionally there is a bug_group table that has bugid to groupid
mappings to show which groups can see a particular bug. If there
are no entries for a bug in this table then the bug is public.
5. Product groups. product_table created to only allow certain
products to be visible for certain groups in both bug entry and
query. This was particulary helpful for support contracts.
6. Of course many (too many) changes to Bugzilla code itself to allow
use with Oracle and still allow operation with Mysql if so
desired. Currently if you use Mysql it is set to use Mysql's old
permission scheme to keep breakage to a minimum. Hopefully one day
this will standardize on one style which may of course be
something completely different.
7. Uses Text::Template perl module for rendering of the dynamic HTML
pages such as enter_bug.cgi, query.cgi, bug_form.pl, and for the
header and footer parts of the page. This allows the html to be
separate from the perl code for customizing the look and feel of
the page to one's preference.
8. There are many other smaller changes. There is also a port to
Oracle that I have been working on as time permits but is not
completely finished but somewhat usable. I will merge it into our
standard code base when it becomes production quality.
Unfortunately there will have to be some conditionals in the code
to make it work with other than Oracle due to some differences
between Oracle and Mysql.
Both the Mysql and Oracle versions of our current code base are
available from ftp://people.redhat.com/dkl. If Terry/Tara wants I
can submit patch files for all of the changes I have made and he
can determine what is suitable for addition to the main bugzilla
cade base. But for me to commit changes to the actual CVS I will
need to back out alot of things that are not suitable for the rest
of the Bugzilla community. I am open to suggestions.
A.2.3. What's the current status of Red Hat Bugzilla?
Note: This information is somewhat dated; I last updated it 7 June
2000. Please see the "Variants" section of "The Bugzilla Guide" for
more up-to-date information regarding Red Hat Bugzilla.
Dave Lawrence:
I suppose the current thread warrants an update on the status of
Oracle and bugzilla ;) We have now been running Bugzilla 2.8 on
Oracle for the last two days in our production environment. I tried
to do as much testing as possible with it before going live which
is some of the reason for the long delay. I did not get enough
feedback as I would have liked from internal developers to help
weed out any bugs still left so I said "Fine, i will take it live
and then I will get the feedback I want :)" So it is now starting
to stabilize and it running quite well after working feverishly the
last two days fixing problems as soon as they came in from the
outside world. The current branch in cvs is up2date if anyone would
like to grab it and try it out. The oracle _setup.pl is broken
right now due to some last minute changes but I will update that
soon. Therefore you would probably need to create the database
tables the old fashioned way using the supplied sql creation
scripts located in the ./oracle directory. We have heavy
optimizations in the database it self thanks to the in-house DBA
here at Red Hat so it is running quite fast. The database itself is
located on a dual PII450 with 1GB ram and 14 high voltage
differential raided scsi drives. The tables and indexes are
partitioned in 4 chuncks across the raided drive which is nice
because when ever you need to do a full table scan, it is actually
starting in 4 different locations on 4 different drives
simultaneously. And the indexes of course are on separate drives
from the data so that speeds things up tremendously. When I can
find the time I will document all that we have done to get this
thing going to help others that may need it.
As Matt has mentioned it is still using out-dated code and with a
little help I would like to bring everything up to date for
eventual incorporation with the main cvs tree. Due to other duties
I have with the company any help with this wiould be appreciated.
What we are using now is what I call a best first effort. It
definitely can be improved on and may even need complete rewrites
in a lot of areas. A lot of changes may have to be made in the way
Bugzilla does things currently to make this transition to a more
generic database interface. Fortunately when making the Oracle
changes I made sure I didn't do anything that I would consider
Oracle specific and could not be easily done with other databases.
Alot of the sql statements need to be broken up into smaller
utilities that themselves would need to make decisions on what
database they are using but the majority of the code can be made
database neutral.
3. Loki Bugzilla (AKA Fenris)
Note: Loki's "Fenris" Bugzilla is based upon the (now ancient)
Bugzilla 2.8 tree, and is no longer actively maintained. It works
well enough for Loki. Additionally, the major differences in Fenris
have now been integrated into the main source tree of Bugzilla, so
there's not much reason to go grab the source. I leave this section
of the FAQ principally for historical interest, but unless Loki has
further input into Bugzilla's future, it will be deprecated in
future versions of the Guide.
A.3.1. What about Loki Bugzilla?
Loki Games has a customized version of Bugzilla available at
http://fenris.lokigames.com. From that page,
You may have noticed that Fenris is a fork from Bugzilla-- our
patches weren't suitable for integration --and a few people have
expressed interest in the code. Fenris has one major improvement
over Bugzilla, and that is individual comments are not appended
onto a string blob, they are stored as a record in a separate
table. This allows you to, for instance, separate comments out
according to privilege levels in case your bug database could
contain sensitive information not for public eyes. We also provide
things like email hiding to protect user's privacy, additional
fields such as 'user_affected' in case someone enters someone
else's bug, comment editing and deletion, and more conditional
system variables than Bugzilla does (turn off attachments,
qacontact, etc.).
A.3.2. Who maintains Fenris (Loki Bugzilla) now?
Raphael Barrerro <raistlin@lokigames.com>. Michael Vance created the
initial fork, but no longer maintains the project.
A.3.3.
4. Pointy-Haired-Boss Questions
Note: The title of this section doesn't mean you're a PHB -- it
just means you probably HAVE a PHB who wants to know this :)
A.4.1. Is Bugzilla web-based or do you have to have specific software
or specific operating system on your machine?
It is web and e-mail based. You can edit bugs by sending specially
formatted email to a properly configured Bugzilla, or control via the
web.
A.4.2. Has anyone you know of already done any Bugzilla integration
with Perforce (SCM software)?
Yes! You can find more information elsewhere in "The Bugzilla Guide"
in the "Integration with Third-Party Products" section. The section on
Perforce isn't very large, but as the maintainer of the Guide is
charged with Perforce/Bugzilla integration by his company, you can
expect this section to grow.
A.4.3. Does Bugzilla allow the user to track multiple projects?
Absolutely! You can track up to a "soft-limit" of around 64 individual
"Products", that can each be composed of as many "Components" as you
want. Check the Administration section of the Bugzilla Guide for more
information regarding setting up Products and Components.
A.4.4. If I am on many projects, and search for all bugs assigned to
me, will Bugzilla list them for me and allow me to sort by project,
severity etc?
Yes.
A.4.5. Does Bugzilla allow attachments (text, screenshots, urls etc)?
If yes, are there any that are NOT allowed?
Yes. There are many specific MIME-types that are pre-defined by
Bugzilla, but you may specify any arbitrary MIME-type you need when
you upload the file. Since all attachments are stored in the database,
however, I recommend storing large binary attachments elsewhere in the
web server's file system and providing a hyperlink as a comment, or in
the provided "URL" field in the bug report.
A.4.6. Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and levels?
Do we have complete freedom to change the labels of fields and format
of them, and the choice of acceptable values?
Yes. However, modifying some fields, notably those related to bug
progression states, also require adjusting the program logic to
compensate for the change.
A.4.7. The index.html page doesn't show the footer. It's really
annoying to have to go to the querypage just to check my "my bugs"
link. How do I get a footer on static HTML pages?
This was a late-breaking question for the Guide, so I just have to
quote the relevant newsgroup thread on it.
> AFAIK, most sites (even if they have SSI enabled) won't have #exec c
md
> enabled. Perhaps what would be better is a #include virtual and a
> footer.cgi the basically has the "require 'CGI.pl' and PutFooter com
mand.
>
> Please note that under most configurations, this also requires namin
g
> the file from index.html to index.shtml (and making sure that it wil
l
> still be reconized as an index). Personally, I think this is better
on
> a per-installation basis (perhaps add something to the FAQ that says
how
> to do this).
Good point. Yeah, easy enough to do, that it shouldn't be a big deal
for
someone to take it on if they want it. FAQ is a good place for it.
> Dave Miller wrote:
>
>> I did a little experimenting with getting the command menu and foot
er on
>> the end of the index page while leaving it as an HTML file...
>>
>> I was successful. :)
>>
>> I added this line:
>>
>>
>>
>> Just before the </BODY> </HTML> at the end of the file. And it wor
ked.
>>
>> Thought I'd toss that out there. Should I check this in? For thos
e that
>> have SSI disabled, it'll act like a comment, so I wouldn't think it
would
>> break anything.
A.4.8. Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics, graphs,
etc? You know, the type of stuff that management likes to see. :)
Yes. Look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/reports.cgi for basic
reporting facilities.
For more advanced reporting, I recommend hooking up a professional
reporting package, such as Crystal Reports, and use ODBC to access the
MySQL database. You can do a lot through the Query page of Bugzilla as
well, but right now Advanced Reporting is much better accomplished
through third-party utilities that can interface with the database
directly.
Advanced Reporting is a Bugzilla 3.X proposed feature.
A.4.9. Is there email notification and if so, what do you see when you
get an email? Do you see bug number and title or is it only the
number?
Email notification is user-configurable. The bug id and Topic of the
bug report accompany each email notification, along with a list of the
changes made.
A.4.10. Can email notification be set up to send to multiple people,
some on the To List, CC List, BCC List etc?
Yes.
A.4.11. If there is email notification, do users have to have any
particular type of email application?
Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format
on the planet.
Note: If you decide to use the bugzilla_email integration features
to allow Bugzilla to record responses to mail with the associated
bug, you may need to caution your users to set their mailer to
"respond to messages in the format in which they were sent". For
security reasons Bugzilla ignores HTML tags in comments, and if a
user sends HTML-based email into Bugzilla the resulting comment
looks downright awful.
A.4.12. If I just wanted to track certain bugs, as they go through
life, can I set it up to alert me via email whenever that bug changes,
whether it be owner, status or description etc.?
Yes. Place yourself in the "cc" field of the bug you wish to monitor.
Then change your "Notify me of changes to" field in the Email Settings
tab of the User Preferences screen in Bugzilla to the "Only those bugs
which I am listed on the CC line" option.
A.4.13. Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If I had
outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug template, could
that template be imported into "matching" fields? If I wanted to take
the results of a query and export that data to MS Excel, could I do
that?
Mozilla allows data export through a custom DTD in XML format. It does
not, however, export to specific formats other than the XML Mozilla
DTD. Importing the data into Excel or any other application is left as
an exercise for the reader.
If you create import filters to other applications from Mozilla's XML,
please submit your modifications for inclusion in future Bugzilla
distributions.
As for data import, any application can send data to Bugzilla through
the HTTP protocol, or through Mozilla's XML API. However, it seems
kind of silly to put another front-end in front of Bugzilla; it makes
more sense to create a simplified bug submission form in HTML. You can
find an excellent example at
http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help/bugzilla-helper.html
A.4.14. Does Bugzilla allow fields to be added, changed or deleted? If
I want to customize the bug submission form to meet our needs, can I
do that using our terminology?
Yes.
A.4.15. Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be used
in other countries? Is it localizable?
Currently, no. Internationalization support for Perl did not exist in
a robust fashion until the recent release of version 5.6.0; Bugzilla
is, and likely will remain (until 3.X) completely non-localized.
A.4.16. Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in Word
format? Excel format?
Yes. No. No.
A.4.17. Can a user re-run a report with a new project, same query?
Yes.
A.4.18. Can a user modify an existing report and then save it into
another name?
You can save an unlimited number of queries in Bugzilla. You are free
to modify them and rename them to your heart's desire.
A.4.19. Does Bugzilla have the ability to search by word, phrase,
compound search?
You have no idea. Bugzilla's query interface, particularly with the
advanced Boolean operators, is incredibly versatile.
A.4.20. Can the admin person establish separate group and individual
user privileges?
Yes.
A.4.21. Does Bugzilla provide record locking when there is
simultaneous access to the same bug? Does the second person get a
notice that the bug is in use or how are they notified?
Bugzilla does not lock records. It provides mid-air collision
detection, and offers the offending user a choice of options to deal
with the conflict.
A.4.22. Are there any backup features provided?
MySQL, the database back-end for Bugzilla, allows hot-backup of data.
You can find strategies for dealing with backup considerations at
http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html
A.4.23. Can users be on the system while a backup is in progress?
Yes. However, commits to the database must wait until the tables are
unlocked. Bugzilla databases are typically very small, and backups
routinely take less than a minute.
A.4.24. What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to
install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of skills does
the person need to have? I need to find out if we were to go with
Bugzilla, what types of individuals would we need to hire and how much
would that cost vs buying an "Out-of-the-Box" solution.
If Bugzilla is set up correctly from the start, continuing maintenance
needs are minimal and can be completed by unskilled labor. Things like
rotate backup tapes and check log files for the word "error".
Commercial Bug-tracking software typically costs somewhere upwards of
$20,000 or more for 5-10 floating licenses. Bugzilla consultation is
available from skilled members of the newsgroup.
As an example, as of this writing I typically charge $115 for the
first hour, and $89 each hour thereafter for consulting work. It takes
me three to five hours to make Bugzilla happy on a Development
installation of Linux-Mandrake.
A.4.25. What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire people
to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this something that takes
hours or weeks to install and a couple of hours per week to maintain
and customize or is this a multi-week install process, plus a full
time job for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
It all depends on your level of commitment. Someone with much Bugzilla
experience can get you up and running in less than a day, and your
Bugzilla install can run untended for years. If your Bugzilla strategy
is critical to your business workflow, hire somebody with reasonable
UNIX or Perl skills to handle your process management and bug-tracking
maintenance & customization.
A.4.26. Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using Bugzilla?
Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies needed as identified
above?
No. MySQL asks, if you find their product valuable, that you purchase
a support contract from them that suits your needs.
5. Bugzilla Installation
A.5.1. How do I download and install Bugzilla?
Check http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/ for details. Once you
download it, untar it, read the README and the Bugzilla Guide.
A.5.2. How do I install Bugzilla on Windows NT?
Installation on Windows NT has its own section in "The Bugzilla
Guide".
A.5.3. Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?
At present, no.
6. Bugzilla Security
A.6.1. How do I completely disable MySQL security if it's giving me
problems (I've followed the instructions in the README!)?
Run mysql like this: "mysqld --skip-grant-tables". Please remember
this makes mysql as secure as taping a $100 to the floor of a football
stadium bathroom for safekeeping. Please read the Security section of
the Administration chapter of "The Bugzilla Guide" before proceeding.
A.6.2. Are there any security problems with Bugzilla?
The Bugzilla code has not undergone a complete security audit. It is
recommended that you closely examine permissions on your Bugzilla
installation, and follow the recommended security guidelines found in
the README and in The Bugzilla Guide.
A.6.3. I've implemented the security fixes mentioned in Chris Yeh's
security advisory of 5/10/2000 advising not to run MySQL as root, and
am running into problems with MySQL no longer working correctly.
This is a common problem, related to running out of file descriptors.
Simply add "ulimit -n unlimited" to the script which starts mysqld.
7. Bugzilla Email
A.7.1. I have a user who doesn't want to receive any more email from
Bugzilla. How do I stop it entirely for this user?
With the email changes to 2.12, the user should be able to set this in
user email preferences.
A.7.2. I'm evaluating/testing Bugzilla, and don't want it to send
email to anyone but me. How do I do it?
Edit the param for the mail text. Replace "To:" with "X-Real-To:",
replace "Cc:" with "X-Real-CC:", and add a "To: (myemailaddress)".
A.7.3. I want whineatnews.pl to whine at something more, or other
than, only new bugs. How do I do it?
Try Klaas Freitag's excellent patch for "whineatassigned"
functionality. You can find it at
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6679. This patch is
against an older version of Bugzilla, so you must apply the diffs
manually.
A.7.4. I don't like/want to use Procmail to hand mail off to
bug_email.pl. What alternatives do I have?
You can call bug_email.pl directly from your aliases file, with an
entry like this:
bugzilla-daemon: "|/usr/local/bin/bugzilla/contrib/bug_email.pl"
However, this is fairly nasty and subject to problems; you also need
to set up your smrsh (sendmail restricted shell) to allow it. In a
pinch, though, it can work.
A.7.5. How do I set up the email interface to submit/change bugs via
email?
You can find an updated README.mailif file in the contrib/ directory
of your Bugzilla distribution that walks you through the setup.
A.7.6. Email takes FOREVER to reach me from bugzilla -- it's extremely
slow. What gives?
If you are using an alternate Mail Transport Agent (MTA other than
sendmail), make sure the options given in the "processmail" script for
all instances of "sendmail" are correct for your MTA. If you are using
Sendmail, you may wish to delete the "-ODeliveryMode=deferred" option
in the "processmail" script for every invocation of "sendmail". (Be
sure and leave the "-t" option, though!)
A better alternative is to change the "-O" option to
"-ODeliveryMode=background". This prevents Sendmail from hanging your
Bugzilla Perl processes if the domain to which it must send mail is
unavailable.
This is now a configurable parameter called "sendmailnow", available
from editparams.cgi.
A.7.7. How come email never reaches me from bugzilla changes?
Double-check that you have not turned off email in your user
preferences. Confirm that Bugzilla is able to send email by visiting
the "Log In" link of your Bugzilla installation and clicking the
"Email me a password" button after entering your email address.
If you never receive mail from Bugzilla, chances you do not have
sendmail in "/usr/lib/sendmail". Ensure sendmail lives in, or is
symlinked to, "/usr/lib/sendmail".
8. Bugzilla Database
A.8.1. I've heard Bugzilla can be used with Oracle?
Red Hat Bugzilla, mentioned above, works with Oracle. The current
version from Mozilla.org does not have this capability. Unfortunately,
though you will sacrifice a lot of the really great features available
in Bugzilla 2.10 and 2.12 if you go with the 2.8-based Redhat version.
A.8.2. Bugs are missing from queries, but exist in the database (and I
can pull them up by specifying the bug ID). What's wrong?
You've almost certainly enabled the "shadow database", but for some
reason it hasn't been updated for all your bugs. This is the database
against which queries are run, so that really complex or slow queries
won't lock up portions of the database for other users. You can turn
off the shadow database in editparams.cgi. If you wish to continue
using the shadow database, then as your "bugs" user run
"./syncshadowdb -syncall" from the command line in the bugzilla
installation directory to recreate your shadow database. After it
finishes, be sure to check the params and make sure that
"queryagainstshadowdb" is still turned on. The syncshadowdb program
turns it off if it was on, and is supposed to turn it back on when
completed; that way, if it crashes in the middle of recreating the
database, it will stay off forever until someone turns it back on by
hand. Apparently, it doesn't always do that yet.
A.8.3. I think my database might be corrupted, or contain invalid
entries. What do I do?
Run the "sanity check" utility (./sanitycheck.cgi in the bugzilla_home
directory) to see! If it all comes back, you're OK. If it doesn't come
back OK (i.e. any red letters), there are certain things Bugzilla can
recover from and certain things it can't. If it can't auto-recover, I
hope you're familiar with mysqladmin commands or have installed
another way to manage your database...
A.8.4. I want to manually edit some entries in my database. How?
There is no facility in Bugzilla itself to do this. It's also
generally not a smart thing to do if you don't know exactly what
you're doing. However, if you understand SQL you can use the
mysqladmin utility to manually insert, delete, and modify table
information. Personally, I use "phpMyAdmin". You have to compile a PHP
module with MySQL support to make it work, but it's very clean and
easy to use.
A.8.5. I try to add myself as a user, but Bugzilla always tells me my
password is wrong.
Certain version of MySQL (notably, 3.23.29 and 3.23.30) accidentally
disabled the "crypt()" function. This prevented MySQL from storing
encrypted passwords. Upgrade to the "3.23 stable" version of MySQL and
you should be good to go.
A.8.6. I think I've set up MySQL permissions correctly, but bugzilla
still can't connect.
Try running MySQL from its binary: "mysqld --skip-grant-tables". This
will allow you to completely rule out grant tables as the cause of
your frustration. However, I do not recommend you run it this way on a
regular basis, unless you really want your web site defaced and your
machine cracked.
A.8.7. How do I synchronize bug information among multiple different
Bugzilla databases?
Well, you can synchronize or you can move bugs. Synchronization will
only work one way -- you can create a read-only copy of the database
at one site, and have it regularly updated at intervals from the main
database.
MySQL has some synchronization features builtin to the latest
releases. It would be great if someone looked into the possibilities
there and provided a report to the newsgroup on how to effectively
synchronize two Bugzilla installations.
If you simply need to transfer bugs from one Bugzilla to another,
checkout the "move.pl" script in the Bugzilla distribution.
A.8.8. Why do I get bizarre errors when trying to submit data,
particularly problems with "groupset"?
If you're sure your MySQL parameters are correct, you might want turn
"strictvaluechecks" OFF in editparams.cgi. If you have "usebugsentry"
set "On", you also cannot submit a bug as readable by more than one
group with "strictvaluechecks" ON.
A.8.9. How come even after I delete bugs, the long descriptions show
up?
Delete everything from $BUZILLA_HOME/shadow. Bugzilla creates shadow
files there, with each filename corresponding to a bug number. Also be
sure to run syncshadowdb to make sure, if you are using a shadow
database, that the shadow database is current.
9. Bugzilla and Win32
A.9.1. What is the easiest way to run Bugzilla on Win32
(Win98+/NT/2K)?
Remove Windows. Install Linux. Install Bugzilla. The boss will never
know the difference.
A.9.2. Is there a "Bundle::Bugzilla" equivalent for Win32?
Not currently. Bundle::Bugzilla enormously simplifies Bugzilla
installation on UNIX systems. If someone can volunteer to create a
suitable PPM bundle for Win32, it would be appreciated.
A.9.3. CGI's are failing with a "something.cgi is not a valid Windows
NT application" error. Why?
Depending on what Web server you are using, you will have to configure
the Web server to treat *.cgi files as CGI scripts. In IIS, you do
this by adding *.cgi to the App Mappings with the <path>\perl.exe %s
%s as the executable.
Microsoft has some advice on this matter, as well:
"Set application mappings. In the ISM, map the extension for the
script file(s) to the executable for the script interpreter. For
example, you might map the extension .py to Python.exe, the
executable for the Python script interpreter. Note For the
ActiveState Perl script interpreter, the extension .pl is
associated with PerlIS.dll by default. If you want to change the
association of .pl to perl.exe, you need to change the application
mapping. In the mapping, you must add two percent (%) characters to
the end of the pathname for perl.exe, as shown in this example:
c:\perl\bin\perl.exe %s %s"
A.9.4. Can I have some general instructions on how to make Bugzilla on
Win32 work?
The following couple entries are deprecated in favor of the Windows
installation instructions available in the "Administration" portion of
"The Bugzilla Guide". However, they are provided here for historical
interest and insight.
1. #!C:/perl/bin/perl had to be added to every perl file.
2. Converted to Net::SMTP to handle mail messages instead of
/usr/bin/sendmail.
3. The crypt function isn't available on Windows NT (at least none t
hat I
am aware), so I made encrypted passwords = plaintext passwords.
4. The system call to diff had to be changed to the Cygwin diff.
5. This was just to get a demo running under NT, it seems to be work
ing
good, and I have inserted almost 100 bugs from another bug tracki
ng
system. Since this work was done just to get an in-house demo, I
am NOT
planning on making a patch for submission to Bugzilla. If you wou
ld
like a zip file, let me know.
Q: Hmm, couldn't figure it out from the general instructions above. H
ow
about step-by-step?
A: Sure! Here ya go!
1. Install IIS 4.0 from the NT Option Pack #4.
2. Download and install Active Perl.
3. Install the Windows GNU tools from Cygwin. Make sure to add the b
in
directory to your system path. (Everyone should have these, wheth
er
they decide to use Bugzilla or not. :-) )
4. Download relevant packages from ActiveState at
http://www.activestate.com/packages/zips/. + DBD-Mysql.zip
5. Extract each zip file with WinZip, and install each ppd file usin
g the
notation: ppm install <module>.ppd
6. Install Mysql. *Note: If you move the default install from c:\my
sql,
you must add the appropriate startup parameters to the NT service
. (ex.
-b e:\\programs\\mysql)
7. Download any Mysql client. http://www.mysql.com/download_win.html
8. Setup MySql. (These are the commands that I used.)
I. Cleanup default database settings.
C:\mysql\bin\mysql -u root mysql
mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE Host='localhost' AND User='';
mysql> quit
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin reload
II. Set password for root.
C:\mysql\bin\mysql -u root mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('new_password')
WHERE user='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root reload
III. Create bugs user.
C:\mysql\bin\mysql -u root -p
mysql> insert into user (host,user,password)
values('localhost','bugs','');
mysql> quit
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root reload
IV. Create the bugs database.
C:\mysql\bin\mysql -u root -p
mysql> create database bugs;
V. Give the bugs user access to the bugs database.
mysql> insert into db
(host,db,user,select_priv,insert_priv,update_priv,delete_pri
v,create_priv,drop_priv)
values('localhost','bugs','bugs','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','N')
mysql> quit
C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root reload
9. Run the table scripts to setup the bugs database.
10. Change CGI.pm to use the following regular expression because of
differing backslashes in NT versus UNIX.
o $0 =~ m:[^\\]*$:;
11. Had to make the crypt password = plain text password in the datab
ase.
(Thanks to Andrew Lahser" <andrew_lahser@merck.com>" on this one.
) The
files that I changed were:
o globals.pl
o CGI.pl
o alternately, you can try commenting all references to 'crypt
'
string and replace them with similar lines but without encry
pt()
or crypr() functions insida all files.
12. Replaced sendmail with Windmail. Basically, you have to come up w
ith a
sendmail substitute for NT. Someone said that they used a Perl mo
dule
(Net::SMTP), but I was trying to save time and do as little Perl
coding
as possible.
13. Added "perl" to the beginning of all Perl system calls that use a
perl
script as an argument and renamed processmail to processmail.pl.
14. In processmail.pl, I added binmode(HANDLE) before all read() call
s. I'm
not sure about this one, but the read() under NT wasn't counting
the
EOLs without the binary read."
A.9.5. I'm having trouble with the perl modules for NT not being able
to talk to to the database.
Your modules may be outdated or inaccurate. Try:
1. Hitting http://www.activestate.com/ActivePerl
2. Download ActivePerl
3. Go to your prompt
4. Type 'ppm'
5. PPM> install DBI DBD-mysql GD
I reckon TimeDate and Data::Dumper come with the activeperl. You can
check the ActiveState site for packages for installation through PPM.
http://www.activestate.com/Packages/
10. Bugzilla Usage
A.10.1. The query page is very confusing. Isn't there a simpler way to
query?
We are developing in that direction. You can follow progress on this
at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16775. Some
functionality is available in Bugzilla 2.12, and is available as
"quicksearch.html"
A.10.2. I'm confused by the behavior of the "accept" button in the
Show Bug form. Why doesn't it assign the bug to me when I accept it?
The current behavior is acceptable to bugzilla.mozilla.org and most
users. I personally don't like it. You have your choice of patches to
change this behavior, however.
Add a "and accept bug" radio button
"Accept" button automatically assigns to you
Note that these patches are somewhat dated. You will need to do the
find and replace manually to apply them. They are very small, though.
It is easy.
A.10.3. I can't upload anything into the database via the "Create
Attachment" link. What am I doing wrong?
The most likely cause is a very old browser or a browser that is
incompatible with file upload via POST. Download the latest Netscape,
Microsoft, or Mozilla browser to handle uploads correctly.
A.10.4. Email submissions to Bugzilla that have attachments end up
asking me to save it as a "cgi" file.
Yup. Just rename it once you download it, or save it under a different
filename. This will not be fixed anytime too soon, because it would
cripple some other functionality.
A.10.5. How do I change a keyword in Bugzilla, once some bugs are
using it?
In the Bugzilla administrator UI, edit the keyword and it will let you
replace the old keyword name with a new one. This will cause a problem
with the keyword cache. Run sanitycheck.cgi to fix it.
11. Bugzilla Hacking
A.11.1. What bugs are in Bugzilla right now?
Try this link to view current bugs or requests for enhancement for
Bugzilla.
You can view bugs marked for 2.14 release here. This list includes
bugs for the 2.14 release that have already been fixed and checked
into CVS. Please consult the Bugzilla Project Page for details on how
to check current sources out of CVS so you can have these bug fixes
early!
A.11.2. How can I change the default priority to a null value? For
instance, have the default priority be "---" instead of "P2"?
This is well-documented here:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49862. Ultimately, it's as
easy as adding the "---" priority field to your localconfig file in
the appropriate area, re-running checksetup.pl, and then changing the
default priority in your browser using "editparams.cgi". Hmm, now that
I think about it, that is kind of a klunky way to handle it, but for
now it's what we have! Although the bug has been closed "resolved
wontfix", there may be a better way to handle this...
A.11.3. What's the best way to submit patches? What guidelines should
I follow?
1. Enter a bug into bugzilla.mozilla.org for the "Webtools" product,
"Bugzilla" component.
2. Upload your patch as a unified DIFF (having used "diff -u" against
the current sources checked out of CVS), or new source file by
clicking "Create a new attachment" link on the bug page you've
just created, and include any descriptions of database changes you
may make, into the bug ID you submitted in step #1. Be sure and
click the "Patch" radio button to indicate the text you are
sending is a patch!
3. Announce your patch and the associated URL
(http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=XXXX) for discussion
in the newsgroup (netscape.public.mozilla.webtools). You'll get a
really good, fairly immediate reaction to the implications of your
patch, which will also give us an idea how well-received the
change would be.
4. If it passes muster with minimal modification, the person to whom
the bug is assigned in Bugzilla is responsible for seeing the
patch is checked into CVS.
5. Bask in the glory of the fact that you helped write the most
successful open-source bug-tracking software on the planet :)
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix B. Software Download Links
All of these sites are current as of April, 2001. Hopefully they'll
stay current for a while.
Apache Web Server: http://www.apache.org Optional web server for
Bugzilla, but recommended because of broad user base and support.
Bugzilla: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/
MySQL: http://www.mysql.org/
Perl: http://www.perl.org/
CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/
DBI Perl module:
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/DBI/
Data::Dumper module:
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/Data/
MySQL related Perl modules:
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/Mysql/
TimeDate Perl module collection:
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/Date/
GD Perl module: ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/GD/
Alternately, you should be able to find the latest version of GD at
http://www.boutell.com/gd/
Chart::Base module:
ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/perl/CPAN/modules/by-module/Chart/
LinuxDoc Software: http://www.linuxdoc.org/ (for documentation
maintenance)
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix C. The Bugzilla Database
Note: This document really needs to be updated with more fleshed
out information about primary keys, interrelationships, and maybe
some nifty tables to document dependencies. Any takers?
_________________________________________________________________
C.1. Database Schema Chart
Database Relationships
Bugzilla database relationships chart
_________________________________________________________________
C.2. MySQL Bugzilla Database Introduction
Contributor(s): Matthew P. Barnson (mbarnson@excitehome.net)
Last update: May 16, 2000
Changes:
Version 1.0: Initial public release (May 16, 2000)
Maintainer: Matthew P. Barnson (mbarnson@excitehome.net)
===
Table Of Contents
===
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
THE BASICS
THE TABLES
THE DETAILS
===
FOREWORD
===
This information comes straight from my life. I was forced to learn
how
Bugzilla organizes database because of nitpicky requests from users fo
r tiny
changes in wording, rather than having people re-educate themselves or
figure out how to work our procedures around the tool. It sucks, but
it can
and will happen to you, so learn how the schema works and deal with it
when it
comes.
I'm sorry this version is plain text. I can whip this info out a lo
t faster
if I'm not concerned about complex formatting. I'll get it into sgml
for easy
portability as time permits.
The Bugzilla Database Schema has a home! In addition to availabilit
y via CVS
and released versions 2.12 and higher of Bugzilla, you can find the la
test &
greatest version of the Bugzilla Database Schema at
http://www.trilobyte.net/barnsons/. This is a living document; please
be sure
you are up-to-date with the latest version before mirroring.
The Bugzilla Database Schema is designed to provide vital informatio
n
regarding the structure of the MySQL database. Where appropriate, thi
s
document will refer to URLs rather than including documents in their e
ntirety
to ensure completeness even should this paper become out of date.
This document is not maintained by Netscape or Netscape employees, s
o please
do not contact them regarding errors or omissions contained herein. Pl
ease
direct all questions, comments, updates, flames, etc. to Matthew P. Ba
rnson
mbarnson@excitehome.net) (barnboy or barnhome on irc.mozilla.org in
#mozwebtools).
I'm sure I've made some glaring errors or omissions in this paper --
please
email me corrections or post corrections to the
netscape.public.mozilla.webtools newsgroup.
===
INTRODUCTION
===
So, here you are with your brand-new installation of Bugzilla. You'
ve got
MySQL set up, Apache working right, Perl DBI and DBD talking to the da
tabase
flawlessly. Maybe you've even entered a few test bugs to make sure em
ail's
working; people seem to be notified of new bugs and changes, and you c
an
enter and edit bugs to your heart's content. Perhaps you've gone thro
ugh the
trouble of setting up a gateway for people to submit bugs to your data
base via
email, have had a few people test it, and received rave reviews from y
our beta
testers.
What's the next thing you do? Outline a training strategy for your
development team, of course, and bring them up to speed on the new too
l you've
labored over for hours.
Your first training session starts off very well! You have a captiv
e
audience which seems enraptured by the efficiency embodied in this thi
ng called
"Bugzilla". You are caught up describing the nifty features, how peop
le can
save favorite queries in the database, set them up as headers and foot
ers on
their pages, customize their layouts, generate reports, track status w
ith
greater efficiency than ever before, leap tall buildings with a single
bound
and rescue Jane from the clutches of Certain Death!
But Certain Death speaks up -- a tiny voice, from the dark corners o
f the
conference room. "I have a concern," the voice hisses from the darkne
ss,
"about the use of the word 'verified'.
The room, previously filled with happy chatter, lapses into reverent
ial
silence as Certain Death (better known as the Vice President of Softwa
re
Engineering) continues. "You see, for two years we've used the word '
verified'
to indicate that a developer or quality assurance engineer has confirm
ed that,
in fact, a bug is valid. I don't want to lose two years of training to
a
new software product. You need to change the bug status of 'verified'
to
'approved' as soon as possible. To avoid confusion, of course."
Oh no! Terror strikes your heart, as you find yourself mumbling "ye
s, yes, I
don't think that would be a problem," You review the changes with Cert
ain
Death, and continue to jabber on, "no, it's not too big a change. I me
an, we
have the source code, right? You know, 'Use the Source, Luke' and all
that...
no problem," All the while you quiver inside like a beached jellyfish
bubbling,
burbling, and boiling on a hot Jamaican sand dune...
Thus begins your adventure into the heart of Bugzilla. You've been
forced
to learn about non-portable enum() fields, varchar columns, and tinyin
t
definitions. The Adventure Awaits You!
===
The Basics
===
If you were like me, at this point you're totally clueless about the
internals of MySQL, and if it weren't for this executive order from th
e Vice
President you couldn't care less about the difference between a "bigin
t" and a
"tinyint" entry in MySQL. I'd refer you first to the MySQL documentat
ion,
available at http://www.mysql.com/doc.html, but that's mostly a confus
ing
morass of high-level database jargon. Here are the basics you need to
know
about the database to proceed:
1. To connect to your database, type "mysql -u root" at the command p
rompt as
any user. If this works without asking you for a password, SHAME ON YO
U! You
should have locked your security down like the README told you to. Yo
u can
find details on locking down your database in the Bugzilla FAQ in this
directory (under "Security"), or more robust security generalities in
the
MySQL searchable documentation at
http://www.mysql.com/php/manual.php3?section=Privilege_system .
2. You should now be at a prompt that looks like this:
mysql>
At the prompt, if "bugs" is the name of your Bugzilla database, type:
mysql> use bugs;
(don't forget the ";" at the end of each line, or you'll be kicking yo
urself
all the way through this documentation)
Young Grasshopper, you are now ready for the unveiling of the Bugzil
la
database, in the next section...
===
THE TABLES
===
Imagine your MySQL database as a series of spreadsheets, and you won
't be too
far off. If you use this command:
mysql> show tables from bugs;
you'll be able to see all the "spreadsheets" (tables) in your database
. Cool,
huh? It's kinda' like a filesystem, only much faster and more robust.
Come
on, I'll show you more!
From the command issued above, you should now have some output that
looks
like this:
+-------------------+
| Tables in bugs |
+-------------------+
| attachments |
| bugs |
| bugs_activity |
| cc |
| components |
| dependencies |
| fielddefs |
| groups |
| keyworddefs |
| keywords |
| logincookies |
| longdescs |
| milestones |
| namedqueries |
| products |
| profiles |
| profiles_activity |
| shadowlog |
| versions |
| votes |
| watch |
+-------------------+
If it doesn't look quite the same, that probably means it's
time to
update this documentation :)
Here's an overview of what each table does. Most columns in each ta
ble have
descriptive names that make it fairly trivial to figure out their jobs
.
attachments: This table stores all attachments to bugs. It tends to b
e your
largest table, yet also generally has the fewest entries because file
attachments are so (relatively) large.
bugs: This is the core of your system. The bugs table stores most of
the
current information about a bug, with the exception of the info stored
in the
other tables.
bugs_activity: This stores information regarding what changes are mad
e to bugs
when -- a history file.
cc: This tiny table simply stores all the CC information for any bug
which has
any entries in the CC field of the bug. Note that, like most other ta
bles in
Bugzilla, it does not refer to users by their user names, but by their
unique
userid, stored as a primary key in the profiles table.
components: This stores the programs and components (or products and
components, in newer Bugzilla parlance) for Bugzilla. Curiously, the
"program"
(product) field is the full name of the product, rather than some othe
r unique
identifier, like bug_id and user_id are elsewhere in the database.
dependencies: Stores data about those cool dependency trees.
fielddefs: A nifty table that defines other tables. For instance, wh
en you
submit a form that changes the value of "AssignedTo" this table allows
translation to the actual field name "assigned_to" for entry into MySQ
L.
groups: defines bitmasks for groups. A bitmask is a number that can
uniquely
identify group memberships. For instance, say the group that is allow
ed to
tweak parameters is assigned a value of "1", the group that is allowed
to edit
users is assigned a "2", and the group that is allowed to create new g
roups is
assigned the bitmask of "4". By uniquely combining the group bitmasks
(much
like the chmod command in UNIX,) you can identify a user is allowed to
tweak
parameters and create groups, but not edit users, by giving him a bitm
ask of
"5", or a user allowed to edit users and create groups, but not tweak
parameters, by giving him a bitmask of "6" Simple, huh?
If this makes no sense to you, try this at the mysql prompt:
mysql> select * from groups;
You'll see the list, it makes much more sense that way.
keyworddefs: Definitions of keywords to be used
keywords: Unlike what you'd think, this table holds which keywords are
associated with which bug id's.
logincookies: This stores every login cookie ever assigned to you for
every
machine you've ever logged into Bugzilla from. Curiously, it never do
es any
housecleaning -- I see cookies in this file I've not used for months.
However,
since Bugzilla never expires your cookie (for convenience' sake), it m
akes
sense.
longdescs: The meat of bugzilla -- here is where all user comments ar
e stored!
You've only got 2^24 bytes per comment (it's a mediumtext field), so s
peak
sparingly -- that's only the amount of space the Old Testament from th
e Bible
would take (uncompressed, 16 megabytes). Each comment is keyed to the
bug_id to which it's attached, so the order is necessarily chronologic
al, for
comments are played back in the order in which they are received.
milestones: Interesting that milestones are associated with a specifi
c product
in this table, but Bugzilla does not yet support differing milestones
by
product through the standard configuration interfaces.
namedqueries: This is where everybody stores their "custom queries".
Very
cool feature; it beats the tar out of having to bookmark each cool que
ry you
construct.
products: What products you have, whether new bug entries are allowed
for the
product, what milestone you're working toward on that product, votes,
etc. It
will be nice when the components table supports these same features, s
o you
could close a particular component for bug entry without having to clo
se an
entire product...
profiles: Ahh, so you were wondering where your precious user informa
tion was
stored? Here it is! With the passwords in plain text for all to see!
(but
sshh... don't tell your users!)
profiles_activity: Need to know who did what when to who's profile?
This'll
tell you, it's a pretty complete history.
shadowlog: I could be mistaken here, but I believe this table tells y
ou when
your shadow database is updated and what commands were used to update
it. We
don't use a shadow database at our site yet, so it's pretty empty for
us.
versions: Version information for every product
votes: Who voted for what when
watch: Who (according to userid) is watching who's bugs (according to
their
userid).
===
THE DETAILS
===
Ahh, so you're wondering just what to do with the information above?
At the
mysql prompt, you can view any information about the columns in a tabl
e with
this command (where "table" is the name of the table you wish to view)
:
mysql> show columns from table;
You can also view all the data in a table with this command:
mysql> select * from table;
-- note: this is a very bad idea to do on, for instance, the "bugs"
table if
you have 50,000 bugs. You'll be sitting there a while until you ctrl-
c or
50,000 bugs play across your screen.
You can limit the display from above a little with the command, wher
e
"column" is the name of the column for which you wish to restrict info
rmation:
mysql> select * from table where (column = "some info");
-- or the reverse of this
mysql> select * from table where (column != "some info");
Let's take our example from the introduction, and assume you need to
change
the word "verified" to "approved" in the resolution field. We know fr
om the
above information that the resolution is likely to be stored in the "b
ugs"
table. Note we'll need to change a little perl code as well as this da
tabase
change, but I won't plunge into that in this document. Let's verify th
e
information is stored in the "bugs" table:
mysql> show columns from bugs
(exceedingly long output truncated here)
| bug_status| enum('UNCONFIRMED','NEW','ASSIGNED','REOPENED','RESOLVED
','VERIFIED','CLOSED')||MUL | UNCONFIRMED||
Sorry about that long line. We see from this that the "bug status"
column is
an "enum field", which is a MySQL peculiarity where a string type fiel
d can
only have certain types of entries. While I think this is very cool,
it's not
standard SQL. Anyway, we need to add the possible enum field entry
'APPROVED' by altering the "bugs" table.
mysql> ALTER table bugs CHANGE bug_status bug_status
-> enum("UNCONFIRMED", "NEW", "ASSIGNED", "REOPENED", "RESOLVED",
-> "VERIFIED", "APPROVED", "CLOSED") not null;
(note we can take three lines or more -- whatever you put in befor
e the
semicolon is evaluated as a single expression)
Now if you do this:
mysql> show columns from bugs;
you'll see that the bug_status field has an extra "APPROVED" enum th
at's
available! Cool thing, too, is that this is reflected on your query p
age as
well -- you can query by the new status. But how's it fit into the ex
isting
scheme of things?
Looks like you need to go back and look for instances of the word "v
erified"
in the perl code for Bugzilla -- wherever you find "verified", change
it to
"approved" and you're in business (make sure that's a case-insensitive
search).
Although you can query by the enum field, you can't give something a s
tatus
of "APPROVED" until you make the perl changes. Note that this change
I
mentioned can also be done by editing checksetup.pl, which automates a
lot of
this. But you need to know this stuff anyway, right?
I hope this database tutorial has been useful for you. If you have
comments
to add, questions, concerns, etc. please direct them to
mbarnson@excitehome.net. Please direct flames to /dev/null :) Have a
nice
day!
===
LINKS
===
Great MySQL tutorial site:
http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/MySQL/
_________________________________________________________________
C.3. MySQL Permissions & Grant Tables
Note: The following portion of documentation comes from my answer
to an old discussion of Keystone, a cool product that does
trouble-ticket tracking for IT departments. I wrote this post to
the Keystone support group regarding MySQL grant table permissions,
and how to use them effectively. It is badly in need of updating,
as I believe MySQL has added a field or two to the grant tables
since this time, but it serves as a decent introduction and
troubleshooting document for grant table issues. I used Keynote to
track my troubles until I discovered Bugzilla, which gave me a
whole new set of troubles to work on : )
From matt_barnson@singletrac.com Wed Jul 7 09:00:07 1999
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 21:37:04 -0700
From: Matthew Barnson matt_barnson@singletrac.com
To: keystone-users@homeport.org
Subject: [keystone-users] Grant Tables FAQ
[The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set]
[Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
[Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]
Maybe we can include this rambling message in the Keystone FAQ? It ge
ts
asked a lot, and the only option current listed in the FAQ is
"--skip-grant-tables".
Really, you can't go wrong by reading section 6 of the MySQL manual, a
t
http://www.mysql.com/Manual/manual.html. I am sure their description
is
better than mine.
MySQL runs fine without permissions set up correctly if you run the my
sql
daemon with the "--skip-grant-tables" option. Running this way denies
access to nobody. Unfortunately, unless you've got yourself firewalle
d it
also opens the potential for abuse if someone knows you're running it.
Additionally, the default permissions for MySQL allow anyone at localh
ost
access to the database if the database name begins with "test_" or is
named
"test" (i.e. "test_keystone"). You can change the name of your databa
se in
the keystone.conf file ($sys_dbname). This is the way I am doing it f
or
some of my databases, and it works fine.
The methods described below assume you're running MySQL on the same bo
x as
your webserver, and that you don't mind if your $sys_dbuser for Keysto
ne has
superuser access. See near the bottom of this message for a descripti
on of
what each field does.
Method #1:
1. cd /var/lib
#location where you'll want to run /usr/bin/mysql_install_db shell
script from to get it to work.
2. ln -s mysql data
# soft links the "mysql" directory to "data", which is what
mysql_install_db expects. Alternately, you can edit mysql_install_db
and
change all the "./data" references to "./mysql".
3. Edit /usr/bin/mysql_install_db with your favorite text editor (vi,
emacs, jot, pico, etc.)
A) Copy the "INSERT INTO db VALUES
('%','test\_%','','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y');" and paste it immediately
after
itself. Chage the 'test\_%' value to 'keystone', or the value of
$sys_dbname in keystone.conf.
B) If you are running your keystone database with any user, you'll ne
ed to
copy the "INSERT INTO user VALUES
('localhost','root','','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y','Y');" line
after
itself and change 'root' to the name of the keystone database user
($sys_dbuser) in keystone.conf.
# adds entries to the script to create grant tables for specific
hosts and users. The user you set up has super-user access ($sys_dbus
er) --
you may or may not want this. The layout of mysql_install_db is reall
y very
uncomplicated.
4. /usr/bin/mysqladmin shutdown
# ya gotta shut it down before you can reinstall the grant tables!
5. rm -i /var/lib/mysql/mysql/*.IS?' and answer 'Y' to the deletion
questions.
# nuke your current grant tables. This WILL NOT delete any other
databases than your grant tables.
6. /usr/bin/mysql_install_db
# run the script you just edited to install your new grant tables.
7. mysqladmin -u root password (new_password)
# change the root MySQL password, or else anyone on localhost can
login to MySQL as root and make changes. You can skip this step if yo
u want
keystone to connect as root with no password.
8. mysqladmin -u (webserver_user_name) password (new_password)
# change the password of the $sys_dbuser. Note that you will need
to change the password in the keystone.conf file as well in $sys_dbpas
swd,
and if your permissions are set up incorrectly anybody can type the UR
L to
your keystone.conf file and get the password. Not that this will help
them
much if your permissions are set to @localhost.
Method #2: easier, but a pain reproducing if you have to delete your
grant
tables. This is the "recommended" method for altering grant tables in
MySQL. I don't use it because I like the other way :)
shell> mysql --user=root keystone
mysql> GRANT
SELECT,INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE,INDEX,ALTER,CREATE,DROP,RELOAD,SHUTDOWN,PR
OCESS,
FILE,
ON keystone.*
TO <$sys_dbuser name>@localhost
IDENTIFIED BY '(password)'
WITH GRANT OPTION;
OR
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVELEGES
ON keystone.*
TO <$sys_dbuser name>@localhost
IDENTIFIED BY '(password)'
WITH GRANT OPTION;
# this grants the required permissions to the keystone ($sys_dbuser)
account defined in keystone.conf. However, if you are runnning many
different MySQL-based apps, as we are, it's generally better to edit t
he
mysql_install_db script to be able to quickly reproduce your permissio
ns
structure again. Note that the FILE privelege and WITH GRANT OPTION m
ay not
be in your best interest to include.
GRANT TABLE FIELDS EXPLANATION:
Quick syntax summary: "%" in MySQL is a wildcard. I.E., if you are
defining your DB table and in the 'host' field and enter '%', that mea
ns
that any host can access that database. Of course, that host must als
o have
a valid db user in order to do anything useful. 'db'=name of database
. In
our case, it should be "keystone". "user" should be your "$sys_dbuser
"
defined in keystone.conf. Note that you CANNOT add or change a passwo
rd by
using the "INSERT INTO db (X)" command -- you must change it with the
mysql
-u command as defined above. Passwords are stored encrypted in the My
SQL
database, and if you try to enter it directly into the table they will
not
match.
TABLE: USER. Everything after "password" is a privelege granted (Y/N
).
This table controls individual user global access rights.
'host','user','password','select','insert','update','delete','index','
alter'
,'create','drop','grant','reload','shutdown','process','file'
TABLE: DB. This controls access of USERS to databases.
'host','db','user','select','insert','update','delete','index','alter'
,'crea
te','drop','grant'
TABLE: HOST. This controls which HOSTS are allowed what global acces
s
rights. Note that the HOST table, USER table, and DB table are very c
losely
connected -- if an authorized USER attempts an SQL request from an
unauthorized HOST, she's denied. If a request from an authorized HOST
is
not an authorized USER, it is denied. If a globally authorized USER d
oes
not have rights to a certain DB, she's denied. Get the picture?
'host','db','select','insert','update','delete','index','alter','creat
e','dr
op','grant'
You should now have a working knowledge of MySQL grant tables. If the
re is
anything I've left out of this answer that you feel is pertinent, or i
f my
instructions don't work for you, please let me know and I'll re-post t
his
letter again, corrected. I threw it together one night out of exasper
ation
for all the newbies who don't know squat about MySQL yet, so it is alm
ost
guaranteed to have errors.
Once again, you can't go wrong by reading section 6 of the MySQL manua
l. It
is more detailed than I!
http://www.mysql.com/Manual/manual.html.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
------
10/12/2000
Matthew sent in some mail with updated contact information:
NEW CONTACT INFORMATION:
------------------------
Matthew P. Barnson
Manager, Systems Administration
Excite@Home Business Applications
mbarnson@excitehome.net
(801)234-8300
_________________________________________________________________
C.4. Cleaning up after mucking with Bugzilla
Contributed by Eric Hanson:
There are several things, and one trick. There is a small tiny piece
of
documentation I saw once that said something very important.
1) After pretty much any manual working of the Mysql db, you must
delete a file in the bugzilla directory: data/versioncache
Versioncache basically is a way to speed up bugzilla (from what I
understand). It stores a lot of commonly used information. However,
this file is refreshed every so often (I can't remember the time
interval though). So eventually all changes do propogate out, so you
may see stuff suddenly working.
2) Assuming that failed, you will also have to check something with t
he
checksetup.pl file. It actually is run twice. The first time it
creates the file: localconfig. You can modify localconfig, (or not if
you are doing bug_status stuff) or you should delete localconfig and
rerun your modified checksetup.pl. Since I don't actually see anythin
g
in localconfig pertaining to bug_status, this point is mainly a FYI.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapter 7. Bugzilla Variants
Note: I know there are more variants than just RedHat Bugzilla out
there. Please help me get information about them, their project
status, and benefits there might be in using them or in using their
code in main-tree Bugzilla.
_________________________________________________________________
7.1. Red Hat Bugzilla
Red Hat Bugzilla is probably the most popular Bugzilla variant, aside
from Mozilla Bugzilla, on the planet. One of the major benefits of Red
Hat Bugzilla is the ability to work with Oracle as a database, as well
as MySQL. Here's what Dave Lawrence had to say about the status of Red
Hat Bugzilla,
Hello. I apologize that I am getting back to you so late. It has
been difficult to keep
up with email this past week. I have checked out your updated docum
entation and I will
have to say very good work. A few notes and additions as follows.
(ed: from the FAQ)
>For the record, we are not using any template type implementation
for the cosmetic changes
>maded to Bugzilla. It is just alot of html changes in the code its
elf. I admit I may have
>gotten a little carried away with it but the corporate types asked
for a more standardized
>interface to match up with other projects relating to Red Hat web
sites. A lot of other web
>based internal tools I am working on also look like Bugzilla.
This should probably be changed since we are now in fact using Text
::Template for most
of the html rendering. You actually state this later in your number
ed list.
Also number 6 contradicts number 8 where number 6 would be the most
up to date status
on the Oracle port.
Additional Information:
-----------------------------
1. Comments are now stored in varchar fields of 4k in size each. If
the comment is more
than 4k it is broken up into chunks and given a sort number so each
comment can be re
assembled in the correct order. This was done because originally I
was storing the comments
in a long datatype which unfortunately cannot be indexed or joined
with another table. This
cause the search of text within the long description to be disabled
for a long time. That
is now working and is nto showing any noticeble performance hit tha
t I can tell.
2. Work is being started on internationalizing the Bugzilla source
we have to allow our
Japanese customers to enter bug reports into a single bugzilla syst
em. This will probably
be done by using the nvarchar data types supported by Oracle which
allows storage of
double byte characters and also the use of the Accept-Language in t
he http header for
detection by Bugilla of which language to render.
3. Of course even more cosmetic changes. It is difficult to keep up
with the ever
changing faces of www.redhat.com.
4. Some convenience enhancements in the administration utilities. A
nd more integration
with other internal/external Red Hat web sites.
I hope this information may prove helpful for your documentation. P
lease contact
me if you have any more question or I can do anything else.
Regards
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix D. Useful Patches and Utilities for Bugzilla
D.1. The setperl.csh Utility
You can use the "setperl.csh" utility to quickly and easily change the
path to perl on all your Bugzilla files. This is a C-shell script; if
you do not have "csh" or "tcsh" in the search path on your system, it
will not work!
1. Download the "setperl.csh" utility to your Bugzilla directory and
make it executable.
a. bash# cd /your/path/to/bugzilla
b. bash# wget -O setperl.csh
'http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=107
95'
c. bash# chmod u+x setperl.csh
2. Prepare (and fix) Bugzilla file permissions.
a. bash# chmod u+w *
b. bash# chmod u+x duplicates.cgi
c. bash# chmod a-x bug_status.html
3. Run the script:
bash# ./setperl.csh /your/path/to/perl
Example D-1. Using Setperl to set your perl path
bash# ./setperl.csh /usr/bin/perl
_________________________________________________________________
D.2. Command-line Bugzilla Queries
Users can query Bugzilla from the command line using this suite of
utilities.
The query.conf file contains the mapping from options to field names
and comparison types. Quoted option names are "grepped" for, so it
should be easy to edit this file. Comments (#) have no effect; you
must make sure these lines do not contain any quoted "option"
buglist is a shell script which submits a Bugzilla query and writes
the resulting HTML page to stdout. It supports both short options,
(such as "-Afoo" or "-Rbar") and long options (such as
"--assignedto=foo" or "--reporter=bar"). If the first character of an
option is not "-", it is treated as if it were prefixed with
"--default=".
The columlist is taken from the COLUMNLIST environment variable. This
is equivalent to the "Change Columns" option when you list bugs in
buglist.cgi. If you have already used Bugzilla, use grep COLUMLIST
~/.netscape/cookies to see your current COLUMNLIST setting.
bugs is a simple shell script which calls buglist and extracts the bug
numbers from the output. Adding the prefix
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=" turns the bug list
into a working link if any bugs are found. Counting bugs is easy. Pipe
the results through sed -e 's/,/ /g' | wc | awk '{printf $2 "\n"}'
Akkana says she has good results piping buglist output through w3m -T
text/html -dump
1. Download three files:
a. bash$ wget -O query.conf
'http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=261
57'
b. bash$ wget -O buglist
'http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=269
44'
c. bash# wget -O bugs
'http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=262
15'
2. Make your utilities executable: bash$ chmod u+x buglist bugs
_________________________________________________________________
D.3. The Quicksearch Utility
Quicksearch is a new, experimental feature of the 2.12 release. It
consist of two Javascript files, "quicksearch.js" and
"localconfig.js", and two documentation files, "quicksearch.html" and
"quicksearchhack.html"
The index.html page has been updated to include the QuickSearch text
box.
To take full advantage of the query power, the Bugzilla maintainer
must edit "localconfig.js" according to the value sets used in the
local installation.
Currently, keywords must be hard-coded in localconfig.js. If they are
not, keywords are not automatically recognized. This means, if
localconfig.js is left unconfigured, that searching for a bug with the
"foo" keyword will only find bugs with "foo" in the summary, status
whiteboard, product or component name, but not those with the keyword
"foo".
Workarounds for Bugzilla users:
search for '!foo' (this will find only bugs with the keyword "foo"
search 'foo,!foo' (equivalent to 'foo OR keyword:foo')
When this tool is ported from client-side JavaScript to server-side
Perl, the requirement for hard-coding keywords can be fixed. This bug
has details.
_________________________________________________________________
Appendix E. GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.1, March 2000
Copyright (C) 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place,
Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA Everyone is permitted to copy
and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but
changing it is not allowed.
_________________________________________________________________
0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other
written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone
the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without
modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily,
this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get
credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for
modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative
works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. It
complements the GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft
license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for free
software, because free software needs free documentation: a free
program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the
software does. But this License is not limited to software manuals; it
can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or
whether it is published as a printed book. We recommend this License
principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference.
_________________________________________________________________
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a
notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed
under the terms of this License. The "Document", below, refers to any
such manual or work. Any member of the public is a licensee, and is
addressed as "you".
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing the
Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with
modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of
the Document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the
publishers or authors of the Document to the Document's overall
subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall
directly within that overall subject. (For example, if the Document is
in part a textbook of mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain
any mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical
connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal,
commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position regarding
them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose titles
are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in the notice
that says that the Document is released under this License.
The "Cover Texts" are certain short passages of text that are listed,
as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice that says that
the Document is released under this License.
A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable copy,
represented in a format whose specification is available to the
general public, whose contents can be viewed and edited directly and
straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for images composed of
pixels) generic paint programs or (for drawings) some widely available
drawing editor, and that is suitable for input to text formatters or
for automatic translation to a variety of formats suitable for input
to text formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file
format whose markup has been designed to thwart or discourage
subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent. A copy that is
not "Transparent" is called "Opaque".
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain
ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML
or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple
HTML designed for human modification. Opaque formats include
PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that can be read and edited only
by proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or
processing tools are not generally available, and the
machine-generated HTML produced by some word processors for output
purposes only.
The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself,
plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material
this License requires to appear in the title page. For works in
formats which do not have any title page as such, "Title Page" means
the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title,
preceding the beginning of the body of the text.
_________________________________________________________________
2. VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either
commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the
copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies
to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that you add no
other conditions whatsoever to those of this License. You may not use
technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further
copying of the copies you make or distribute. However, you may accept
compensation in exchange for copies. If you distribute a large enough
number of copies you must also follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above, and
you may publicly display copies.
_________________________________________________________________
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than 100,
and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you must
enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and legibly, all
these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front cover, and
Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must also clearly and
legibly identify you as the publisher of these copies. The front cover
must present the full title with all words of the title equally
prominent and visible. You may add other material on the covers in
addition. Copying with changes limited to the covers, as long as they
preserve the title of the Document and satisfy these conditions, can
be treated as verbatim copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit
legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit
reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto adjacent
pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document numbering
more than 100, you must either include a machine-readable Transparent
copy along with each Opaque copy, or state in or with each Opaque copy
a publicly-accessible computer-network location containing a complete
Transparent copy of the Document, free of added material, which the
general network-using public has access to download anonymously at no
charge using public-standard network protocols. If you use the latter
option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you begin
distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that this
Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated location
until at least one year after the last time you distribute an Opaque
copy (directly or through your agents or retailers) of that edition to
the public.
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors of the
Document well before redistributing any large number of copies, to
give them a chance to provide you with an updated version of the
Document.
_________________________________________________________________
4. MODIFICATIONS
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document under
the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you release
the Modified Version under precisely this License, with the Modified
Version filling the role of the Document, thus licensing distribution
and modification of the Modified Version to whoever possesses a copy
of it. In addition, you must do these things in the Modified Version:
A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title distinct
from that of the Document, and from those of previous versions
(which should, if there were any, be listed in the History section
of the Document). You may use the same title as a previous version
if the original publisher of that version gives permission.
B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or
entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the
Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal
authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has
less than five).
C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the Modified
Version, as the publisher.
D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications
adjacent to the other copyright notices.
F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license notice
giving the public permission to use the Modified Version under the
terms of this License, in the form shown in the Addendum below.
G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant
Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document's license
notice.
H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and add to
it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If
there is no section entitled "History" in the Document, create one
stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as
given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified
Version as stated in the previous sentence.
J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for
public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise
the network locations given in the Document for previous versions
it was based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You
may omit a network location for a work that was published at least
four years before the Document itself, or if the original
publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications",
preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the
substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements
and/or dedications given therein.
L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document, unaltered in
their text and in their titles. Section numbers or the equivalent
are not considered part of the section titles.
M. Delete any section entitled "Endorsements". Such a section may not
be included in the Modified Version.
N. Do not retitle any existing section as "Endorsements" or to
conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or
appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no material
copied from the Document, you may at your option designate some or all
of these sections as invariant. To do this, add their titles to the
list of Invariant Sections in the Modified Version's license notice.
These titles must be distinct from any other section titles.
You may add a section entitled "Endorsements", provided it contains
nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by various
parties--for example, statements of peer review or that the text has
been approved by an organization as the authoritative definition of a
standard.
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a
passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list
of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one passage of
Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be added by (or
through arrangements made by) any one entity. If the Document already
includes a cover text for the same cover, previously added by you or
by arrangement made by the same entity you are acting on behalf of,
you may not add another; but you may replace the old one, on explicit
permission from the previous publisher that added the old one.
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this License
give permission to use their names for publicity for or to assert or
imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
_________________________________________________________________
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
You may combine the Document with other documents released under this
License, under the terms defined in section 4 above for modified
versions, provided that you include in the combination all of the
Invariant Sections of all of the original documents, unmodified, and
list them all as Invariant Sections of your combined work in its
license notice.
The combined work need only contain one copy of this License, and
multiple identical Invariant Sections may be replaced with a single
copy. If there are multiple Invariant Sections with the same name but
different contents, make the title of each such section unique by
adding at the end of it, in parentheses, the name of the original
author or publisher of that section if known, or else a unique number.
Make the same adjustment to the section titles in the list of
Invariant Sections in the license notice of the combined work.
In the combination, you must combine any sections entitled "History"
in the various original documents, forming one section entitled
"History"; likewise combine any sections entitled "Acknowledgements",
and any sections entitled "Dedications". You must delete all sections
entitled "Endorsements."
_________________________________________________________________
6. COLLECTIONS OF DOCUMENTS
You may make a collection consisting of the Document and other
documents released under this License, and replace the individual
copies of this License in the various documents with a single copy
that is included in the collection, provided that you follow the rules
of this License for verbatim copying of each of the documents in all
other respects.
You may extract a single document from such a collection, and
distribute it individually under this License, provided you insert a
copy of this License into the extracted document, and follow this
License in all other respects regarding verbatim copying of that
document.
_________________________________________________________________
7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS
A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate
and independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or
distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version
of the Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the
compilation. Such a compilation is called an "aggregate", and this
License does not apply to the other self-contained works thus compiled
with the Document, on account of their being thus compiled, if they
are not themselves derivative works of the Document.
If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these
copies of the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter
of the entire aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on
covers that surround only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise
they must appear on covers around the whole aggregate.
_________________________________________________________________
8. TRANSLATION
Translation is considered a kind of modification, so you may
distribute translations of the Document under the terms of section 4.
Replacing Invariant Sections with translations requires special
permission from their copyright holders, but you may include
translations of some or all Invariant Sections in addition to the
original versions of these Invariant Sections. You may include a
translation of this License provided that you also include the
original English version of this License. In case of a disagreement
between the translation and the original English version of this
License, the original English version will prevail.
_________________________________________________________________
9. TERMINATION
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Document
except as expressly provided for under this License. Any other attempt
to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Document is void, and
will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However,
parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this
License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such
parties remain in full compliance.
_________________________________________________________________
10. FUTURE REVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE
The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions of the
GNU Free Documentation License from time to time. Such new versions
will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in
detail to address new problems or concerns. See
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/.
Each version of the License is given a distinguishing version number.
If the Document specifies that a particular numbered version of this
License "or any later version" applies to it, you have the option of
following the terms and conditions either of that specified version or
of any later version that has been published (not as a draft) by the
Free Software Foundation. If the Document does not specify a version
number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not
as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.
_________________________________________________________________
How to use this License for your documents
To use this License in a document you have written, include a copy of
the License in the document and put the following copyright and
license notices just after the title page:
Copyright (c) YEAR YOUR NAME. 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 the Invariant
Sections being LIST THEIR TITLES, with the Front-Cover Texts being
LIST, and with the Back-Cover Texts being LIST. A copy of the
license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation
License".
If you have no Invariant Sections, write "with no Invariant Sections"
instead of saying which ones are invariant. If you have no Front-Cover
Texts, write "no Front-Cover Texts" instead of "Front-Cover Texts
being LIST"; likewise for Back-Cover Texts.
If your document contains nontrivial examples of program code, we
recommend releasing these examples in parallel under your choice of
free software license, such as the GNU General Public License, to
permit their use in free software.
Glossary
A
There are no entries for A
B
Bug
A "Bug" in Bugzilla refers to an issue entered into the
database which has an associated number, assignments, comments,
etc. Many also refer to a "Ticket" or "Issue"; in this context,
they are synonymous.
Bug Number
Each Bugzilla Bug is assigned a number that uniquely identifies
that Bug. The Bug associated with a Bug Number can be pulled up
via a query, or easily from the very front page by typing the
number in the "Find" box.
Bug Life Cycle
A Bug has stages through which it must pass before becoming a
"closed bug", including acceptance, resolution, and
verification. The "Bug Life Cycle" is moderately flexible
according to the needs of the organization using it, though.
I
Infinite Loop
See: Recursion
P
Product
A Product is a broad category of types of bugs. In general,
there are several Components to a Product. A Product also
defines a default Group (used for Bug Security) for all bugs
entered into components beneath it.
Example 1. A Sample Product
A company sells a software product called "X". They also
maintain some older software called "Y", and have a secret
project "Z". An effective use of Products might be to create
Products "X", "Y", and "Z", each with Components "User
Interface", "Database", and "Business Logic". They might also
change group permissions so that only those people who are
members of Group "Z" can see components and bugs under Product
"Z".
Q
Q/A
"Q/A" is short for "Quality Assurance". In most large software
development organizations, there is a team devoted to ensuring
the product meets minimum standards before shipping. This team
will also generally want to track the progress of bugs over
their life cycle, thus the need for the "Q/A Contact" field in
a Bug.
R
Recursion
See: Infinite Loop
Z
Zarro Boogs Found
This is the cryptic response sent by Bugzilla when a query
returned no results. It is just a goofy way of saying "Zero
Bugs Found".
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