Bugzilla 3.0
Bugzilla 3.0, nine years in the making? Much life left?
Bugzilla 3.0 was recently released. “It was almost 9 years ago when Bugzilla 2.0 was released”, but the reality is that there have been at least 10 releases with major functionality since 2.0.1 Bugzilla and its derivatives2 are the most popular open source bug tracker for large projects3 including GNOME, Linux, Mozilla projects, RedHat Linux, and Novell (SUSE) Linux.
Are you using Bugzilla as well? Why?
My friend Zbigniew Braniecki (gandalf) of my former employer Flock is a passionate Bugzilla developer and shares his enthusiasm about this release, but no details, other that he is working on the Polish translation.
What is the release announcement reporting as interesting about this release?
- Custom Fields
- mod_perl support for greatly-improved performance
- Per-Product Permissions
- XML-RPC Interface
- Create and Modify Bugs by Email
Is there anything that excites you particularly about this release?
Dave Miller (justdave) shares what Bugzilla today looks like:
- A templating system for any output going to end-users be that email or HTML pages, or XML, CSV, RSS.
- The majority of the back-end code has been refactored into a comprehensive set of Perl modules.
- Bugzilla works in Apache’s mod_perl.
What makes Bugzilla special to you? Is there people on the team that contribute to you enjoying working with Bugzilla?
I am a little disappointed to see that Mozilla is not running this version4. Eating their own food?
The Bugzilla 3.0 release announcement includes “which is made entirely by volunteers around the world” — isn’t Mozilla and other companies paying people to work on Bugzilla?
Is Bugzilla on a path to a slow death with Malone being the future, or Trac5 which is currently widely used for smaller projects?
Max Kanat-Alexander contemplates a rewrite of Bugzilla. There has been a lot of great feedback to Max’s post including from Bugzilla’s original author Terry Weissman and GNOME Bugzilla gardner Luis Villa (tieguy) who responded:
virtually every bugzilla installation is heavily customized, people have very different expectations about the bugzilla release/upgrade cycle than they do for consumer-facing, uncustomized software. Additionally, lets be frank- bugzilla has not exactly been blazing away with new features (in part because of the perl problem). Yes, it would suck to stop having new features altogether, but it isn’t like bugzilla is currently doing tons of new features and releasing quickly anyway. (Happy first birthday, 2.22.
Personally, I would love to see Bugzilla retired as the user experience for most people in various roles on a software project has and is still awkward. Mozilla Marketer Paul Kim describes his first experience with Bugzilla as overwhelming and was grateful to his colleague (ironically) Mozilla Design Lead Mike Beltzer to guide him through it. “So many form fields. Arcana in spades (”Blocking 1.8.1.4″ - what did that mean?).”
But I am not sure that there is an open source bug tracker ready to take its place. What do you think?
Footnotes
- Why did it take Bugzilla 9 years to get from version 2.0 to 3.0? [↩]
- Almost all Bugzilla installations seem to be heavily customized. Is Collab.net’s Issue Tracker still based on Bugzilla? [↩]
- PHP and MySQL use PHP bug system, originally written by Rasmus Lerdorf. What are other large projects using? [↩]
- The version at bugs.mozilla.org listed as 2.23.4+. Maybe that is the same thing? [↩]
- My friend Jeff Lindsay offers free hosted Trac at DevjaVu [↩]
