Mozilla's 100,000th Bug

benb writes: "bugzilla.mozilla.org just hit bug 100,000 (cached). This proves its scalability. BugZilla is used to track work on Mozilla. Every change has to have a bug. This includes new features and bugs found by developers/testers during development (bugs that never reached users). We also get a lot of duplicates (which dedicated triagers sort out). So, the number of filed closed bugs cannot be used as criteria of the quality of Mozilla. During usage, BugZilla evolved to a very comfortable web platform for filing/tracking bugs, one that has only very few competition (of which I know). Examples are the emailing and dependency systems. In fact, BugZilla is probably the most important communication medium used in the Mozilla project (apart from the source code itself)."

Comments

100,000 bugs?

[VaultX]

you would imagine most larger projects had this many bugs, if they counted each and every one..

Re:100,000 bugs?

[why-is-it]

you would imagine most larger projects had this many bugs, if they counted each and every one..

Indeed. If they used a similar system, I wonder how many bugs m$ would have found by now?

Re:100,000 bugs?

[youreanidiot]

So why when we hear that a stupid web browser, one that has been years in the making, has 100,000 bugs and it STILL sucks is such great progress???

Hehe.. that's a great question. Probably because open-source advocates tend to be a little on the retarded side. Always preaching for "open standards" and this and that.. and in the process only isolating themselves from the rest of the world. I don't know. I think I used to care, and then I just gave up.

Re:100,000 bugs?

[HyperbolicParabaloid]

The difference: As the article said these are mostly bugs caught BEFORE a user ever saw them. If this were Microsoft, it would be the number of bugs found by end users who had paid money for the privalege.

Re:100,000 bugs?

[Drazi100]

not only that taht would mean windows is infinitely scalable.. which is definitely ridiculous.

Re:100,000 bugs?

[Dyolf Knip]

One thing's for sure, you couldn't store it with a 32-bit integer!

Re:100,000 bugs?

[-brazil-]

groan No, genius. Learn to read. The number of bugs shows the scalability of the bug tracking system, not of the softare that has the bugs - most of which are resolved anyway.

Re:100,000 bugs?

[-brazil-]

Learn to read please: 100,000 is the total number of bugs reported on Mozilla ever. Including duplicates, and mostly resolved bugs, often removed before they turned up in a public release. Feature requests are also handled as "bugs". And remember that Mozilla is still considered Beta, as evidenced by the sub-1.0 version number.

Compare this with 65,000 unresolved bugs that W2K had in the final release.

Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[rekoil]

My company (a mid-sized national ISP) uses it for internal development/bug tracking. Who else?

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[spudnic]

We use it in our development company. We set up a system for each project we are working on. Clients can review our work as we develop it. They can then submit bugs, suggestions, concerns, and feature requests.

It has definately cut down on the time we spend on the phone with them, and the clients like the idea that they can go in and see how and when we are addressing each of their submissions.

In 2 years, will the Mozilla team possibly be remembered as "the guys who wrote bugzilla" instead of "the guys who wrote mozilla"?

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Baumann]

We use it as well, with appropriate hacks. It was fairly easy to tie in with our change control system, and the developers can't totally ignore their bugs - email is a bitch at times :)

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Doc Hopper]

I think it's very possible that mozilla.org may become better known for Bugzilla than Mozilla : ) Bugzilla is already the premier open-source bug-tracking system; I consider it a really good point in the favor of any company if they are using it.
However, I must caution that it's still a real pain to install on Microsoft Windows, and requires non-trivial UNIX knowledge to make work on a UNIX platform. Also, it's heavily geared towards Apache web server, since that's what B.M.O. uses and most of those admins running Bugzilla use it. AFAIK it still works fine on iPlanet and IIS, but you need to implement your own security to protect certain critical files from remote inspection. There's a file we use called "localconfig" which contains your database password; that file must not be readable by web users!

If you're an admin for an enterprise looking for a high-quality bug tracker, I highly recommend Bugzilla. If all you're looking to do is track bugs on a very small product, or if you're not an experienced admin on your platform of choice for Bugzilla, a mailing list is probably much more the thing for you. I love Bugzilla, but like most other enterprise-class software, it can be difficult to get up and configured correctly, particularly if you don't already have the necessary prerequisite packages already installed.

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Ed Avis]

The only downside is that Bugzilla is slanted towards bug tracking. Is anyone using it for more general task tracking (support requests, for example, or something completely unrelated to computers)?

What customizations to Bugzilla would be necessary to do that?

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Karl Cocknozzle]

The people at my company laughed when I suggested Bugzilla instead of our recently purchased RATIONAL SUITE. I explained that Bugzilla has all the bug tracking web-features we wanted today, instead of waiting until we could "afford to implement the web piece". It seems the licensing costs for Rational Suite are sort of, well, high.

But nobody listened to me, and a million dollars later the entire enterprise runs Rational. Sucks.

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[chetohevia]

We've been using it at Ximian for general project tracking and it works pretty well. Customizing it for various different tasks isn't too hard.

I wouldn't be too concerened about scalability, either-- if you're tracking something huge, then you can assign each team its own database. No problem.

For a non-technical audience, the major issue is making the query page not look huge and scary. And probably calling it something like "The issue management website" and not "BugZilla."

Check out the "simple bug reporting assistant" we've set up at:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/simple-bug-guide.html
for a reasonable way of making bugzilla look a little more simple for non-technical users.

Aaron Weber
Ximian, Inc.

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Doc Hopper]

I sympathize with your plight. I've succeeded in persuading a lot of people to use Bugzilla instead of some closed-source bug-tracker, but the pointy-haired boss contingent continues to fight it.
I've replaced some very expensive systems with Bugzilla, too. For programmers, Bugzilla is great. For managers, it's scary. Welcome to open source : )
Some proprietary systems have reasonable niche markets. For instance, if you require integrated inventory tracking, IT trouble-ticket tracking, moderated discussion forums, and tech support telephony integration, Bugzilla may not be the right tool for you. I've used it successfully for two out of the three (just takes a little user retraining and some trivial Bugzilla source hacking), but it's really important to decide if it has what you really need in your corporate environment.

Me, I say use Bugzilla for software development, then write a plug-in to your other systems using its XML or HTTP API's so they can communicate; that way you're using the best tool for the job!

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[Doc Hopper]

I've used it as such. We had our IT, UNIX Admin, and product engineering staff all using Bugzilla at my former employer. Each group had their own projects, and the IT and Systems Administration support staff made heavy use of the Bugzilla email interface so that their tracking system was transparent to other staff. I have a couple custom hacks to support this currently in B.M.O. (look for bugs submitted by barnboy@trilobyte.net) which allow user account creation at bug submission (an open bug receiver, like GNATS) and command-line specification of product/component depending upon email address it was sent to. The hacks are pretty ugly (but dead simple!), though, which is why I haven't put them into CVS.

It worked well for us. I'd love to go back and revisit this some in the future, though, since it's a commonly-requested feature and more documentation on how to do it is probably necessary.

I'm the doc maintainer for Bugzilla, I guess I'd better get busy!

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[nn4l]

Bugzilla is somewhat difficult to install. I have written a few shell scripts that help install Bugzilla on any UNIX system.

This article has detailed instructions and all required source code: The Bugzilla Installer

The Bugzilla Installer will unpack, compile and install Bugzilla and all required components on a UNIX system. Administrator rights are not required; you can install everything in an arbitrary location. It has been tested on different Sun Solaris and Linux installations.

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[scrytch]

If you're an admin for an enterprise looking for a high-quality bug tracker, I highly recommend Bugzilla.

Given today's climate, with businesses not wanting to spend a dime on anything, I might recommend Bugzilla too. If you want to spend money on a decent product, I would recommend Remedy AR. There's not a thing I've seen Bugzilla do that doesn't exist in any other professional tracking db product, and there's several features from even an ancient version of remedy that I liked, like being able to define the UI at the client end, being able to lock down same functionality, the template-driven RemedyWeb, autoalerts configurable per-user, per support group, so on. Bugzilla has the basic function, it just needs a lot of tweaking to not drive the users of it utterly insane if they have to enter about four dozen incidents a day with it.

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[baptiste]

There's not a thing I've seen Bugzilla do that doesn't exist in any other professional tracking db product, and there's several features from even an ancient version of remedy that I liked

Which goes to show you that YMMV. Personally, I lvoe Bugzilla, use it for personal projects and business development. Its great, I can hack it if I want, and it does the job. I used Remedy in a previous life - what a nightmare. Yes, it had some nice features like the custom UI and stuff, but in teh end it was so sumbersome. They had APIs but we weren't allowed ot use them. We finally got them, they wouldn't compile on HPUX. It was a mess. Remedy was fine if you used the GUI, but try to integrate it with a web front end, some type of script (say a test suite which would open bugs on tets failures, etc) and it was tricky and convoluted.

Look, nobody is saying Bugzilla is the best bug/trouble ticket system out there. But for the price, its damn good one. I knwo companies out there using Remedy who hardly use any of the advanced features but pay millions for it - in their case Bugzilla could be a real cost saver. Again, every situation is different.

Me? I was SO glad when I didn't have to use Remedy products anymore - my tic went away!

Re:Bugzilla rocks, indeed.

[scrytch]

I was SO glad when I didn't have to use Remedy products anymore - my tic went away!

Like you mentioned, all depends on how it's configured. Using Remedy at one company was evil itself, with the server simply dropping RPC calls at high load causing the clients to time out, and a cluttered UI that couldn't have been designed worse by blind palsied chimpanzees. Then I went to the next company and the interface was simplicity and power itself, it became a joy to use. I found the perl API for Remedy AR was quite functional, but it was unfortunately pretty limited...

Anyway, Bugzilla is limited by being nothing but a bug tracking system as opposed to a general issue tracking system. It has no concept of asset tracking (useful to know what the configuration of a specific desktop is and how many issues it's generated), SLA's (e.g. having different ticket aging thresholds and actions for different systems), or autoticketing (having a script enter a ticket). Mozilla hasn't needed those features, and a lot of shops don't, but a helpdesk does.

Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[purduephotog]

... as the most bugs. What was the quote earler? 250,000 bugs in the latest release of MS's software?

Now if I could just get the browser to run in a stable, repeatable manner AND not have website CC submision pages crash it out....

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[cyberdonny]

What was the quote earler? 250,000 bugs in the latest release of MS's software?

I think it was actually only around 65535. More than that, and their excellent bug tracking software overflows...

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[Ded Bob]

I think it was actually only around 65535. More than that, and their excellent bug tracking software overflows...

Good thing they at least don't sign their shorts or else we would be seeing only 32767.

Also, it does not overflow for Microsoft; they just think they have eliminated a lot of bugs when the bits cycle around.

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[benb]

> I think it was actually only around 65535

Right. But those were *open* bugs, while the 100000 bugs in bugzilla are *all* bugs, incl. closed ones. Open bugs in bugzilla.mozilla.org are about 18000, some of which are not about the Mozilla appsuite (but BugZilla, the website etc.) and some of which are enhancement requests.

But looking at Microsoft, you have to remember that this was a whole operating system, probably including the web browser, the web server and all the other little applications that ship with it. So, those 65000 bugs are not as high as it might first look like.

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[hwaara]

Now if I could just get the browser to run in a stable, repeatable manner AND not have website CC submision pages crash it out....

Report a bug! ;)

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[jdh28]

As I remember, the 63K "bugs" also included requests for enhancements, etc, too.

john

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[Misch]

Good thing they at least don't sign their shorts or else we would be seeing only 32767.

If the DOJ ever gets their act together and gets this monopoly anti-trust back on track, I'm sure they'll be signing their shorts... in the sense that a dog marks its territory.

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[LinuxParanoid]

My understanding was that the 65,000 Microsoft "bugs" was basically "potential bugs" generated by a lint-like checker that searched for buffer overflows, certain pointer manipulations and other common 'maybe-a-bug' issues.

--LP

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[Gallo Nero]

It may be just me or my setup but I've noticed at least one massive bug in IE6 - intermitently - it really screws up when trying to handle animated gifs. The gifs go too fast and flicker and the screen flashes when rolling over rollover images. Has anyone else noticed this? I'm running it on NT 4 with sp 6 installed. I've not got round to installing it on another system so I may just have a weird setup.

Shoot some worms!

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[Cato the Elder]

Hey, using signed numbers in your bug tracker is a great feature. I can just see a marketing type out there saying: "And our product is so good, it has negative bugs!"

Re:Mozzilla may soon surpass Microsoft...

[grepnyc]

>>250,000 bugs in the latest release of MS's software?

That would be 250,000 bugs in notepad?

pressure/grep

100,000 bugs proves scalability?

[Xpilot]

Lots of bugs == high scalability ;)

If that's the case imagine how scalable Windows is!

Re:100,000 bugs proves scalability?

[sconest]

Scalability of Bugzilla was meant, I guess

Re:amusing

[RogrWilco]

1) Windows 2000 was not a new creation
2) Many of the bugs are duplicates
3) The fact that they track and repair every bug is a testament to open source
4) Mozilla is an evolving project, which means as more technologies are introduced, more work needs to be done
5) Have you ever written a program the scope of Mozilla without having any bugs on the first go?

100,000 = scalability?

[NineNine]

You guys may want to wake up. Real-world business applications go far, far beyond 100,000 records. I certainly wouldn't call 100,000 'scalable'. Hell, MS Access can handle 100,000 records just fine. Try 100,000,000. Then we can start talking about scalable.

Re:100,000 = scalability?

[NDPTAL85]

They meant scalability not in its own technical specifications but in how it can present data to the developers in a way that is not overwhelming.

Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[kawika]

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that someone has tried to attack the bug-tracking problem. But 100K records isn't even a decent test case for most big database projects. A database I use has a table with 70 million records and another with 20 million. Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP. ;-)

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[GreyPoopon]

A database I use has a table with 70 million records and another with 20 million.

I didn't think that Bugzilla was comparing itself to a database. In fact, if you want to make database comparisons, you would need to compare the database that Bugzilla uses against your database.

I believe the author's point is that Bugzilla has been successfully used through a lifetime of over 100,000 bug / issue reports. This would probaby be considered ample testing to prove that the system was capable of being used in large project environments.

If you want to make a case against scalability, you will need to point out another bug tracking system that has recently tracked more issues on a single project (or group of related projects). Something other than Microsoft's bug tracking software, please. ;)

Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP. ;-)

On the other hand, maybe if Bugzilla doesn't work so well, it will be incentive to keep the number of bugs at a minimum. Would that be a good method of improving the code quality during the first pass? :-)

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[Doc Hopper]

Bugzilla is tracking 100,000 bugs. However, each bug tracks the following states:
Product
Component
Status
Resolution
Assigned_to
QA Contact
URL
Summary
Status Whiteboard
Keywords
Platform
OS
Version
Priority
Severity
Unlimited CC's
Attachments
Dependencies
Votes
Comments
History

At a bare minimum, there are at least 20 fields associated with each bug. In general, though, there are several large user comments, attachments containing patches, etc. for each bug. Figure 25 fields as a nice round number. 100,000 Bugzilla bugs >= 2.5 million individual records. Bugzilla.mozilla.org may not be in the 20 or 30 million league, but it's certainly getting there.

I use Bugzilla on a daily basis, and am also the documentation maintainer for the project. After using it since shortly after it was released, I can say without equivocation that it is more feature-rich, easier to use, and scalable than any other bug-tracking system I've seen. As the first full-featured open-source bug-tracking system released, it has a lot of first-mover support from developers and documentors, and is getting enormously better with each new release.

Go check it out, pre-populate 20 million bugs in your own database, and see what you think! I think you'll be impressed.

Sorry if this is too glowing a review; you should expect a biased opinion from those who have used Bugzilla for any length of time : )

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[pacc]

I believe the author's point is that Bugzilla has been successfully used through a lifetime of over 100,000 bug / issue reports.

Yes, they must have had the foresightness to allow for such large numbers in the lookup URL.
Totally useless information...

If you can't keep the size of the bugreports to, say, 10% of the code size noone could possibly care to fix the code anyway - the only good measure for scalability would be the number of active bugs

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[benb]

> there are several large user comments

Right. Each comment is a record of its own. And some bugs are, printed out, as long as 50+ letter pages. A bug with 10 comments is probably average, some have hundreds of them.

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[scrytch]

Bugzilla looks to me like a web front end. It should be able to scale up to a billion bugs. The database behind it is what's important when you start running big queries and reports on it. Took half the damn night to run metrics on the tracking db with a million tickets where I used to do helpdesk... the fact that they didn't index any of the timestamps could have had something to do with it... They preferred to blame it on other factors, so they ended up making searches case-sensitive "for performance reasons" ... i ended up writing my own command-line tools to query the db.

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[arunkv]

At my company (a very large software company :) ), one of the division's bug count is now nearing 2 million. A hundred thousand bugs in a bug tracking system is nothing great and proves nothing about scalability.

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[p3d0]

Yeah, and each of those fields has an average of 30 characters of data, each of which (assuming Unicode) requires 16 bits, for a total of 1.2 billion individual records!

Nice math, dude.

Re:Scalable at 100,000 records? Feh!

[casret]

Just to clarify Matt's comments, please take a look at the schema . Every comment is a long_desc, and is kept in a different record. Also please note the bugs_activity table, this is an audit table and notes every change that a bug goes through. I'm not sure about mozilla, but for our local installation, this table is at least 10x the number of bugs.

Other tables with a many to one relation to bugs are CC, keywords, votes, and attachments. So Matt's numbers are very reasonable.

Re:scalability

[mkelley]

I think this was a way to avoid slashdotting the Mozilla server.

Re:100,000 bugs? Mostly duplicates

[Jagin]

Did you read the submission properly? They're mostly duplicates... people submitting bugs that others already have. Bugzilla's email replying facility looks to be a real cool feature! I wonder... does SourceForge's bug tracker have anything close to this?

Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[rcharbon]

bugzilla.mozilla.org just hit bug 100 000...the number of filed closed bugs cannot be used as criteria of the quality of Mozilla

Keep this in mind the next time you're dumping on M$ for announcing they've fixed thousands of bugs in a Windows product

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[RogrWilco]

Now if they only woudn't call it a new version and charge for it....

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[snake_dad]

Mozilla is still in beta. Keep that in mind as well.

At least the Mozilla people admit that it's still in beta...

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[hconnellan]

I submitted bug #99832. It spite of my best effort in research it turned out to be a duplicate of #99057, #98355 and #95957.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[GeorgeH]

I thought /. was harping on Microsoft for shipping a product with thousands of STILL OPEN bugs. Oh, and the quote is "Foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[n3m6]

ofcourse and its good to know that MS ships the product with 65000 bugs that was never attended to !!!! thank you so much for reminding me. And does anybody know if this is true. that the number of bugs in a system increases with the number of lines of code ? 100,000 bugs mean that the code is growing ? or 100,000 bugs mean that attention is paid to the product ? or hopefully it will be fixed ? maybe i should compare the feedback recieved to an MS product, how its handled by techsupport after hours on the hold. to bugzilla ? enlighten me please.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[partingshot]

> ... for shipping a product ...

So mozilla isn't shipping?

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[n3m6]

attention is paid to the product

HUH!

next time use preview before you submit wise ass.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[GeorgeH]

Mozilla, while usable (I'm posting this from 0.9.4) isn't at 1.0 yet and so I wouldn't consider it shipping (and I hope people would agree with me). Also, note the difference between having n thousand bugs open when shipping a product (such as Windows) and having 100,000 bugs in the database, most of which are closed.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[sheldon]

It's not a shipping product, yet it's being shipped with most major Linux distributions and has been for over a year now?

How convenient, and people accuse Microsoft of releasing software in a beta stage.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[saqmaster]

Indeed.

And when comparing the complexity of something like the Windows O/S with something like Mozilla, 65k compared to 100k items in the tracking system (not necessarily bugs) is actually quite good..

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[bluephone]

So mozilla isn't shipping?

No. as far as we're concerned, it's not. Currently, the source is available, and that's it. Binaries are only made available for testing purposes. In the early days there were no binaries available at all from mozilla.org. Milestones are more stable releases that are made available so that a larger number of people than would normally DL a nightly will grab it and bang away, and hopefully shake out bugs.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[ichimunki]

Well, if you call beta-testing shipping, yeah. But keep in mind that with an open source development approach, one has to make the source and compiled versions of the applicatin available pretty much to the public. That way developers can obtain the needed source and testers can obtain the needed beta executables.

What we all need to do is get over this "well MS shipped a product with a zillion bugs in it" nonsense. Even well-designed and thoroughly tested projects are going to have bugs and at some point the testing cycle is going to have to be closed.

If you're a commercial software firm, this means burning a CD and shipping some boxes. If you're an open source project, this means putting a version number like 1.0.0 on the package. Either way, there will still be bugs left to find. The true test (especially for proprietary software firms) is how quickly reported bugs are found and repaired and users have available to them either the new software or the means to patch their existing software.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[WolfWithoutAClause]

To be fair to MS; MS claims that a lot of these 'bugs' were lint warnings. Apparently MS's process raises a bug report against each new warning.

On second thoughts, why would I want to be fair to MS ;-)

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[gargle]

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.

- Walt Whitman, Song Of Myself

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[jesser]

Crash bugs are hard to search for, because they're usually summarized by the function that Mozilla crashes in rather than how you get Mozilla to crash. Some crash bugs have both, but often a crash can be triggered in several different ways ways. 26% of the crashers I've filed turned out to be duplicates, compared to 15% of all of the bugs I've reported.

Your dup helped to point out that lots of people were encountering bug 99057, so it wasn't completely wasted.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[youreanidiot]

How convenient, and people accuse Microsoft of releasing software in a beta stage.

Yeah.. I really do get tired of all of the open-source better than m"$", and everyone else pretty much, bullshit. They have a piece of crap browser, that will never oficially "ship". Even if it does.. in 2005 or something when it's bug-free, it will also be standards-compliance-free. Such a futile fate. Give up.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[p3d0]

When did Slashdot become the Microsoft defence league?

Can't a single article come and go with no mention of Microsoft?

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[dpilot]

Then don't use it.

Don't read about it, either. There was a title above this article, and you *could* have chosen to bypass if. If you're "tired of reading", it's your own fault for clicking. You even wasted your time on a response.

It's your choice, and that's what this is all about. But don't forget my choice, while you're at it. I'm glad Mozilla is still alive, kicking, and putting out betas for others and me to try.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[Kidbro]

There are two things you should remember:
1. Mozilla is not released as a product yet. If you chose to d/l if, you're doing so because you (in the eyes of the mozilla dev staff) is a tester.
2. As per the story: Every change has to have a bug. This means that changes are also considered bugs in bugzilla (I can't guarantee that myself, as I have not used bugzilla, but according to the story that's the way it is). I don't know what the changes/bugs ratio is, but I assume it's more than 2:1.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[asa]

There are over 100,000 reports in Bugzilla. The Mozilla community has already resolved about 82,000 of those issues. Not all reports in Bugzilla are filed against the Mozilla application suite. We also use Bugzilla for tracking all kinds of other issues from CVS access to bugs in Bugzilla itself.

--Asa

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[Kidbro]

From the release page: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!.
Or, if you wish, from the frontpage: We provide binaries for testing and feedback.

:)

Whether this dist or that chooses to include a snapshot of the cvs in their release, is not really up to Mozilla, is it?

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[bluephone]

As a poster above poined out, it is shipping. It's in every Linux distribution you can find on a store shelf.

Just because Linux distros are including milestone builds, doesn't mean that Moilla is "shipping". As far as we're concerned, it's NOT. The community feels that 1.0 is "shipping", regardless fo what distros do. Mandrake is beta testing 8.1, so do you consider 8.1 to be "shipping"? What about Windows XP? It's been RTMed, and OEMs have it for systems, but it's not on shelves. Is it "shipping"? No, and no. Now Bugzilla, THAT'S "shpping" as 2.14 was just recently released. Great product there, btw...

Besides, what do you call Netscape 6.x

I call it Netscape 6.x, a product based on Mozilla. But, once again Netscape != Mozilla. How hard is it to follow that?

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[snake_dad]

Then don't use it.

I was not complaining about mozilla being beta, just stating fact. I have no problem with it, even though it is not considered a finished product. As a matter of fact, I'm using Mozilla 0.9.4+ to write this reply, and if you don't mind I'll continue using it as my primary webbrowser :).

What I meant was that M$ just dumped win x.x into the stores, charging a lot of $ for a product that was (is?) not finished either, and abusing millions of paying customers as beta-testers.

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[Kidbro]

I don't care what the Mozilla page says.
That's a rather peculiar way to handle the information on the only official site about the browser :)
I won't really speak about how Mozilla is not a Netscape only project...

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[uchian]

How convenient, and people accuse Microsoft of releasing software in a beta stage.

You miss the point - Microsoft portays the image that the software isn't in the beta stage.

And much as I _hate_ Mozilla, I use it as my backup for any page which for some reason or other konqueror doesn't render properly.

And I also have to say, the latest version hasn't crashed on me once yet...

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[jsse]

Keep this in mind the next time you're dumping on M$ for announcing they've fixed thousands of bugs in a Windows product

Mod this as troll would only make you more like a M$ dude. :)

We should feel sorry for having so many bugs, and on the other hand feel proud of keep accurate tracking of the bugs.

Quality we go! :)

Re:Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds

[bluephone]

Can I go to the store and buy a CD with Mozilla on it? Yes

Is that CD put out by Mozilla? No. Is mozilla.org responsible in any way shape or form for what is on that CD? No. Is mozilla.org connected in any way shape or form with whoever oput that CD out? No.

Can I buy a CD with Netscape 6 on it from the web? Yes

Is that CD put out by NS? Yes. Is NS responsible for the contents of that CD? Yes. Does NS provide support? Yes.

In the end, Mozilla is not shipping. Sorry.

Oh, by the way sparky, Mozilla is not Netscape!

Lots of bugs == high quality

[HoserHead]

Unlike what most people think, a high bug count does not equal poor quality. A high bug count is actually a very good indicator of excellent testing, and this testing leads to high quality.

Mozilla is a very high-profile application, and is also very complex. A lot of people report bugs in it, ranging from showstopping to very trivial. I'm personally very encouraged that Mozilla has such good testing, because it directly translates into a better product.

Bottom line is: the more bugs, the better. (This is something a lot of people don't seem to recognise, particularly with Free Software development. When that user reports a bug you don't like, thank them instead of closing it without fixing it! They're contributing to the quality of your software!)

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[bribecka]

A high bug count is actually a very good indicator of excellent testing, and this testing leads to high quality.

I don't think it's so much that a high bug count indicates quality, but the number of those bugs that are actually fixed, of course. Supposedly Win95 shipped with something like 50K unresolved bugs (could be wrong)--in that case, 50K bugs found != quality.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Supposedly Win95 shipped with something like 50K unresolved bugs"

Which is a meaningless figure since a bug can be anything from the rather important "Win95 fails to boot on Tuesdays" to the less important "Win95 looks horrible in 16 color mode" to the trivial/inane "Win95 lacks a space invaders-type game".

When your bug system covers everything from show stoppers to feature requests, the bug count becomes fairly meaningless, other than as a source of potential work for the developers.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[BJH]

64,000 unresolved bugs at release, TYVM. This article is about 100,000 bugs in total (most of them are resolved).

BTW, is your name really "Wankers"? How... unusual.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[streetlawyer]

OTOH, you have to admit that, whatever the bugs count, Mozilla does, as a matter of objective fact, fucking suck.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[Tom7]

I like mozilla a lot, actually.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[vikter]

I would have to disagree. The more bugs does not mean better quality. The more fixed bugs means better quality.

-Vic

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[morie]

100.000 total bugs
64.000 unresolved -
36.000 resolved

64.000 vs. 36.000, so most of them were not resolved at release.

Re:Lots of bugs == high quality

[BJH]

Er... are you following the conversation here?

The "100,000 bugs" figure is the total number of bugs (resolved and unresolved) registered for Mozilla. The "64,000 bugs" figure is the number of unresolved bugs in Windows 2000 at release.

If you check Bugzilla, you'll find the number of unresolved bugs to be much less than that. (To be exact, the Bugzilla bug summary page shows about 18,000 unresolved bugs.)

Hey I found one!!

[canning]

We also get a lot of duplicates (which dedicated triagers sort out)

Slashdot's 100,000,000 bug.

Re:100,000 bugs? Mostly duplicates

[keesh]

Yep, if you post a bug there's a checkbox to be notified of replies, changes etc. by email.

Re:scalability

[Jagin]

They're talking about the scalability of the system to handle a large amount of records -- so that developers are not overwhelmed. Its about system architecture -- NOT about the scalability of their servers and whether or not the hardware can handle the slashdot effect.

Re:10,000 Bugs ?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Where? I haven't noticed them!

Well that's because they're being obscured by 90,000 bugs. ;-)

Topic for the trolls..

[Jagin]

I don't think this should have been posted... the overwhelming majority of those bugs are duplicates or closed. But all the postings we'll see will either say that:

Mozzy is buggy as hell since it has 100,000 bugs (duh! read!)

It can't be scalable if they post a cached link! (not about hardware!)

100,000 isn't large when considering system architecture (valid)

So... what's the point?

Re:10,000 Bugs ?!?

[Spacelem]

All right, I'll be honest, there are one or two little annoyances I have with Mozilla, but I'm still really impressed by the whole project and I'm going to keep using it.

Overlooked fact

[RogrWilco]

Mozilla has yet to reach 1.0, which they stated would be the equivalent of a production release. For al the linux bashers, that's 100,000 bugs which never made it to the release product.
Similarly, why did MS build bug reporting tools into XP and IE 6? To build a better product. Too bad that they are all basically new versions. Anyone know if this is in the final release?

Windows XP = Windows 95 v5.0
95->98->98se->me->XP!

Re:Overlooked fact

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually Windows XP is Windows NT 6 or 5.1 or so. It is not a direct derivative of Windows 95; at least, it is no more so than Windows 95 is a direct derivative of CP/M. Windows NT was a complete redesign of the Windows product, and MS has finally gotten around to building a home consumer version of it.

Re:Overlooked fact

[alexburke]

Similarly, why did MS build bug reporting tools into XP and IE 6? To build a better product. Too bad that they are all basically new versions. Anyone know if this is in the final release?

Yes, it is. In XP (build 2600 RTM), in the System Control Panel, Advanced tab, there's an Error Reporting button which spawns a dialog with the following options:

o Disable error reporting
[ ] But notify me when errors occur

o Enable error reporting
[ ] Windows operating system
[ ] Programs[Choose Programs...]

[OK][Cancel]

( "o" = radio button, "[ ]" = checkbox, "[OK]" = button)

Re:Overlooked fact

[kirkb]

In the free software world, the "release" version of a program is a very arbitrary thing. Nothing magic will happen at 1.0. You won't see shrinkwrapped copies on store shelves. You wont see it being sold online. It's even unlikely that the number of mozilla users will change significantly once 1.0 hits.
Free/open projects often never reach 1.0 for several years, so for such projects it's not really fair to suggest that bugs caught below 1.0 are different or somehow less real than "release product" bugs.

25 fields * 100,000 records == 100,000 records.

[MemRaven]

Each field is a column in a row. Thus 100,000 bugs == 100,000 rows, 100,000 bugs == 100,000 records. 100,000 bugs != 20 million bugs.

Re:25 fields * 100,000 records == 100,000 records.

[gorilla]

Well that depends on your database design. If I was designing a database to hold flexible information, I might not make a column for each possible field, because that would mean adding/deleting a column every time I changed the fields - a real pain. I might design it so that there is a table for the bugs, a table for the possible fields, and a table to join them with the fields.

Re:25 fields * 100,000 records == 100,000 records.

[Cato]

You are quite free to design your database like this, but it will perform very poorly on most available DBMSs.

Re:25 fields * 100,000 records == 100,000 records.

[gorilla]

It certainly won't perform as fast the single row model, but the disadvantages can be outweighted by the advantages of having the model presented to the user being quickly and easily changed without having to update the dataschema.

Re:25 fields * 100,000 records == 100,000 records.

[JourneymanMereel]

The actual bugzilla database schema is a mixture of both. Where the is only one possible value/bug, the information is stored in the bugs table. Where there is a potentially unlimted amount of values/bug, there's a seperate table. Keep in mind that the Bugzilla database also handles things such as Users and all their prefs (ie, mail filtering, saved queries, etc.). All things considered, I think Terry did the open source community a great service when he wrote Bugzilla and another great service by allowing others to hack on it (in fact, Terry's current involvement in the project is limited to advice delivered via IRC and the occational comment in a bug :)

I wish we could here

[barzok]

But our clients insist on brain-dead-simple software (oversimplified, actually; they simply refuse to learn or listen to anything technical) to use. We've shelled out big money for Visual Intercept and they're not even totally happy with that.

Re:good thing?

[Salsaman]

I think it was proof of the scalability of Bugzilla (mozilla's bug reporting tool) that they were talking about.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with Linux.

Re:good thing?

[Kilobug]

First, ot was not a proof of the scalability of Mozilla, but of Bugzilla.

Second, you must notice that a "bug" for Bugzilla is not only a bug, it's also feature requests.
Remove all features requests, duplicates, and invalid bugs, and the number will drop very fast.

Third, it's not the number of actual bugs, but the number of bugs reported and fix since the start of the Mozilla project, long ago. And most of them are fixed today.

The problem with MS is not that they have thousands of bugs, is that they release products as stable with thousands of bugs. I'ld be interesting to see the number of bugs fixed by the IE team since IE 3.0 from IE 6.0, including all internal bugfixes on versions that were never released.

Re:Hypocricy

[markyd]

100,00 show stopping bugs?

Not really. One of those is mine and its a spelling error in the relase notes. Show stopping, I think not. Try reading the post, and you'll see what it says about development bugs not even reaching the end users.

I realise you posted soley to produce an angry reaction (trolling), so I'm not even gonna argue with your over-opinionated final paragraph.
Mark

High bug count == sloppy programmers

[Otis_INF]

Hammering in code is one of the things in programming that can be a cause of bugs. The more accurate and less sloppy your programmers are, the less bugs WILL BE FOUND during testing. The quality of testing is therefor not determinable from the amount of bugs found. Though: m_iQualityOfProgrammers = CalcProgrammerQuality(iAmountBugsFound, iQualityOfTesting);

So 'the more bugs, the better', please... the best thing you can have after excessive tests is 0 bugs.

Re:High bug count == sloppy programmers

[jilles]

Unfortunately there are very few of these god-like programmers around. Reality dictates that you need a safetynet in the form of a good testing procedure to ensure product quality.

Bugfree software does not exist so the more bugs you find the better your tests are and since tests are also written & performed by programmers this is also a good indication of programmer quality.

A test that would result in 0 bugs found is worthless because that just means that the persons performing the tests are clueless. You don't test to prove that your program has no bugs instead you test to find the most visible bugs. In this respect, testing is very similar to research since you generally should try to disprove a hypothesis (and by failing to do so conclude that it must be valid).

Re:High bug count == sloppy programmers

[jilles]

Of course you are right. I was merely claiming that 0 bugs means nothing and is more a statement of testing incompetence than a statement of programming quality. Software with 0 bugs does not exist and good programmers are aware of that.

Of course good design, good methodology and so on helps improve product quality. Bugs found per kloc is certainly a good measure. However you should consider that something like mozilla is measured in MLOC (million lines of code). By your own measures there would be about 2000 bugs in that code. Given that the complexity rises exponentially rather than linearly if the size of a project increases that is probably a very optimistic estimate. I.e. even if all programmers are excellent (very unlikely), mozilla should be full of bugs waiting to be found.

To the credit of Mozilla they manage to track all bugs that are found in a very large development team.

Mozilla's attitude is much more mature than the attitude of e.g. Microsoft (deny until exposed in public) and ultimately leads to better products.

Re:Nothing to be proud about.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, it's the scalability of the Bugzilla tracking software they're referring to, not the scalability of Mozilla. Mozilla.org has two major products: Mozilla, and Bugzilla. The story is about the high quality of Bugzilla, not of Mozilla. While Mozilla is still not quite ready for prime time (but it will be d good when it is), Bugzilla is quite ready for prime time.

Funny...

[_LORAX_]

I just started using mozilla last week a couple od days before 0.9.4 and propmtly upgraded to 0.9.4 for the stop popups feature.

Since I have started using it again I remember now how things should work. I use almost not cookies, I have it set to prompt and remeber so it was sorse the first day or so, but has gotten much better.

Mozilla is a champion for privacy and security, with only one last privacy bugaboo that I feel needs fixing before I switch permematly from pine. That feature is no email should initiate network access ( HTML images, url's, css,... ) becase it;'s an easy way for the marketers to validate the address.

Cheers to all those that have worked on the project.

bugs != bugreports

[hwaara]

A common problem with people, as previously said, is that some people take "bugreports" as "bugs" and vice versa.

A bug report is always a good thing, regardless whether it's a WORKSFORME bug, INVALID or will get FIXED. It means good testing.

A bug, on the other hand, is something that needs fixing and is never good.

See the difference? :)

On small problem I've had...

[pberry]

...is trying to figure out where a bug should be filed. The bug page is daunting, especially if you aren't familiar with modules and how they are broken down.

I only mention this because I run the nightly builds just about everyday and they ask us to help file bug reports.

This problem may be a combintation of bugzilla user interface and the complexity of the mozilla project though, and not just one or the other...

But if the developers like it, that is probably more important ;-)

Re:On small problem I've had...

[sconest]

Just try to do your best.
One of the part of bug triaging is to be sure that the component is the correct one.

Re:On small problem I've had...

[hwaara]

...is trying to figure out where a bug should be filed. The bug page is daunting, especially if you aren't familiar with modules and how they are broken down.

1. Go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org 2. Click the big "Report a Bug" link

then just follow the instructions.

Couldn't be easier!

Re:On small problem I've had...

[Doc Hopper]

Have you tried the Bugzilla Helper? It really helps newbies write a quality bug report; I highly recommend adapting it to your needs at your site if you wish to run a local Bugzilla where you work. However, it's a bit of a maintenance problem right now; I'd love to see this page automated and cached to allow a user-friendly front-end to bug reporting which tracks the database as it changes, rather than requiring manual updates.

Re:On small problem I've had...

[Gerv]

I maintain the Bugzilla Helper, which most people use to file their first few bugs. Any comments on how to make the process easier are welcome. :-)

Gerv

Re:On small problem I've had...

[pberry]

Excellent! Thank you. I wish I had this when I messing around with M18 ;-)

Re:On small problem I've had...

[basilfawlty]

Just try to do your best.
One of the part of bug triaging is to be sure that the component is the correct one.

IOW, use the bugzilla helper (the /big/ "Report a bug" link on bugzilla's front page), fill out the form with as much information as you can provide, and make your best guess as to component. If you're wrong, someone will come along behind you and change the component to the correct one.

Don't let the complexity of Moz's development structure keep you from reporting bugs. If you don't report them, they may not get fixed (or even noticed, depending on the bug). And that helps no one.

Re:On small problem I've had...

[DeadSea]

I usually search for similar bugs and then file a bug in the same area. It works pretty well.

I would like to see dups handled better though. Ideally dups shouldn't be "closed" until the bug that they were marked a dup of is also closed. I have found that an oft duplicated bug isn't found because the title uses slightly different terminology than the search terms. Keeping dups around in the search results would basically allow different descriptions for the same bug and steer people searching for bugs in the right direction.

Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[magi]

I have always found the web interface awfully awkward to use. Are there any frontend client applications for it?

While web interfaces are easy to make and maintain, client apps are usually much more user friendly. Most importantly, they make it possible to add features on the client side without need to modify the web service. That's why we have mail and news clients - web email systems generally suck and are difficult to improve without the involvement of the provider of the server software.

I would imagine that a GUI would be especially useful for the developers, as it could update the bug lists without having to refresh web pages, etc. It could also hold a local copy of the database, for doing searches, etc. Well, on small databases at least.

The GUI could also be integrated to the apps. For example, KDE already has some nice support for sending bug reports from applications, but it could be improved, especially for searching existing bugs. Eliminating the use of web browser entirely would be a great improvement for making bug reports.

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[riggwelter]

That's pretty well what GNOME's bug-buddy is, if you file a bug report using that, it goes into the GNOME bugzilla, and is filed under your email address if you've registered with it.

I think it could interface to other bugzillas with a recompile...

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[ajs]

Yep, there's one called Mozilla ;-)

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[pi_rules]

How about writing the bugzilla client in XUL? I personall think that'd be a pretty cool project. Perhaps one day I'll look into it; as I run Buzilla for projects here at our own company. Not likely though; given that I'm prett lazy.

Justin Buist

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[Gerv]

It has been suggested :-) When the Bugzilla UI is templatised, this will be a lot easier.

Gerv

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[benb]

> I would imagine that a GUI would be especially
> useful for the developers

You want us to use the web frontend. We spend a lot of time in BugZilla. The more dogfood we eat, the better.

Re:Are there any Bugzilla GUIs?

[jesser]

You want us to use the web frontend. We spend a lot of time in BugZilla. The more dogfood [tf.hut.fi] we eat, the better.

That's only true if you happen to be developing a web browser. (Fwiw, I don't think there's any problem with using a web interface to a bug-tracking system, although I can't say I've tried any other interfaces.)

Re:scalability

[Doc Hopper]

It is, unfortunately, true that Bugzilla is fairly easily swamped by massive traffic. We encourage the use of mod_throttle on Apache for just this reason. Often, web spiders attempt to index publicly-available Bugzilla sites, and that can basically amount to a denial-of-service attack.

I think you'll find this is true with most heavily dynamic, database-driven web sites. I'd ultimately love to get better scalability than Slashdot out of Bugzilla, but in the near-term we're trying to avoid dependencies on mod_perl and certain other areas of performance enhancement because they cause dependencies on certain types of web servers.

There is some heavy discussion going on amongst the Bugzilla developers about using some kind of caching method to prevent slashdotting of Bugzilla in the future, but for now it's not there. Contributions welcome!

MS Bugtracking system Cannot...

[da5idnetlimit.com]

Go Over 65535 before a Buffer Overflow...
8)

Re:100,000 bugs? Mostly duplicates

[Doc Hopper]

More than just a checkbox on the bug, really. You have an entire user preferences dialog for each user where you can indicate your preferences on bugmail for various states of the bug, whether you're on the CC list or you reported it, that kind of thing. It works pretty well.

One unused feature of Bugzilla at bugzilla.mozilla.org is the ability to reply to bugmail and have it tacked into the database. Many others use this feature, however; you can find the Bugzilla email interface and associated documentation in the contrib/ directory when you download the Bugzilla 2.14 tarball.

However, be warned that the email reply feature is not as thoroughly tested as the web interface. This is another reason for it not to be in use at B.M.O. There are currently a couple of notable problems with it:
1. Even if a user account is disabled, they can still add comments to bugs, or create new ones, by sending email to the bugmail reply address.
2. It's case-sensitive on usernames, so if your capitalization isn't correct on your From: header it will refuse to update the bug.
3. You can't currently change parameters of the bug through bugmail (ergo: setting @priority=1 in the mail doesn't work).

It would be great to have a new developer help improve the Bugzilla Mail Interface. Nobody's paid much attention to it for about a year, since Seth Landsman stopped maintaining it. Any takers?

Re:Hello, scalability?

[hwaara]

If Microsoft made the same announcement about one of their products I don't think we'd be applauding them for their scalability!

This isn't Microsoft. What's your point? ;)

Commercial use

[bvankuik]

For your interest:

A friend of mine works for a small company in the business of selling a Java-driven backoffice which pushes stock-information. They use the BugZilla system and are happy about it.

bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforge

[Zooko]

Is bugzilla better than debian bug tracking? Which is the best bug tracking system?

Personally, I refuse to use SourceForge's bug tracking system because it requires that I fiddle with a mouse and click on little HTML widgets and then wait for a few seconds while the form is submitted to see if it worked. I have better things to do with my time than waste it trying to use HTML and HTTP as a user interface.

I really love debian's bug tracking system, and the `reportbug' package, which allows me to do all my bug reporting with good old e-mail, from the command line, as God intended.

Regards,

Zooko

Re:scalability

[DrXym]

Mozilla's Bugzilla is running on hardware designed to cope with the Mozilla development team, not the Mozilla development team + 100,000 Slashdot readers.

Winamp uses it!

[leibnizme]

Winamp has been using Bugzilla for the last year to assist in developing the new Winamp 3. It's certainly great for developers, provided that they have a dedicated user base that's willing to "weed out" bad or duplicate bugs. It's also great for users who are beta testing - then we can know which bugs they know about, without e-mailing the developers and wasting their time.

While Winamp's Bugzilla doesn't have the same magnitude as Mozilla's, it's still quite valuable.

Winamp Bugzilla

What the numbers really mean

[havardw]

In excess of 100 000 bug reports have been filed against Mozilla and associated products (such as the web site and bugzilla itself) since bugzilla opened. As of right now, 79 913 of these bugs are fixed, leaving us with ~20 000 open bugs.

Many of these bugs are duplicates not yet discovered, many are feature requests, and some are bugs for tracking other bugs ("meta bugs").

The number of open bugs in the "Browser" component right now is 11 619, which is closer to the real bug count. (But the number is still too large, see above)

Re:100,000?

[DrXym]

100,000 bugs in total & mostly fixed - not 100,000 open bugs.

Re:Nothing to be proud about.

[Doc Hopper]

Great comment!
True that probably half the 100,000 bugs are duplicates. B.M.O. also tracks feature requests.

There are actually a whole suite of webtools for users to check out, including Bonsai, Tinderbox/Tinderbox2, a rip-off of an old version of LXR, automated build scripts, and some miscellaneous stat-tracking stuff. However, behind Mozilla, Bugzilla is far and away the most popular product at mozilla.org. We very recently changed it from being part of the Webtools product to its own product entirely, and since the 2.12 release its popularity has just exploded.

I'd love more people to start using the other webtools as well! Where I work, we're using Tinderbox2 and Bonsai. Tinderbox2 is email-based automated build tracking which integrates with CVS, while Bonsai is a MySQL-based CVS query front-end. Bonsai is quite similar to CVSweb, but offers powerful query features and some automated tracking (it doesn't handle spaces,though -- if you try it, you've been warned!). If you have a need for powerful CVS queries and automated build tracking, give them a shot.

Tinderbox2 and Bonsai are available via CVS, like the very latest Bugzilla. To check it out on a UNIX system:
$ export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org: /cvsroot
$ cvs login
password: (anything works here)
$ cvs checkout mozilla/webtools
or for just CVS Bugzilla:
$ cvs checkout mozilla/webtools/bugzilla

Have fun!

Scalability?

[cr@ckwhore]

bugzilla.mozilla.org just hit bug 100,000 (cached). This proves its scalability

Heh? Ok... this just sounds funny. I agree that bugzilla is scaleable, but 100,000 bugs doesn't really constitute a *large* database either. What about its scalability on the raw hit traffic front? Well, you've linked to a cached version, so that "proves its scalability"? That kinda reminds me of seeing hdtv advertising on my regular TV, and there's always some bozo in the room that says, "hey, look how clear that picture is!".

Re:Scalability?

[Gerv]

100,000 bugs doesn't really constitute a *large* database

Have you looked at the schema? A bug is a very complex thing = it's not just a row in a table. Add in 50,000 file attachments as well.

Gerv

Re:Scalability?

[cr@ckwhore]

I realize that, and it still doesn't amount to a large database. Thanks Gerv.

good, can you explain it to me?

[iainl]

Sorry, I'm feeling thick this morning. Since triager is a fairly reasonable made-up word to describe someone who performs triage, you must be referring to something there I missed. Can you fill me in?

Reminds me of the 65000+ bugs of Win2K

[frleong]

Many slashdotters kept criticizing that Windows 2000 had 65000+ bugs. And now it is time to celebrate Bugzilla Mozilla's 100000th bug?

Come on, how can be people be promoting double standard so blatantly?

Re:Reminds me of the 65000+ bugs of Win2K

[Misch]

Again, Windows 2K SHIPPED with that many bugs. The 100,000 count is the total number of bugs SUBMITTED. It's more like the difference between "There are 65,000 stories on Slashdot's frontpage", and "100,000 stories have been submitted to /., most have either been rejected, or posted on the page. There are a few in the submission bin." Windows 2K is like the first one, Mozilla is like the second one.

Re:Reminds me of the 65000+ bugs of Win2K

[frleong]

You have deliberately failed to acknowledge that most of them were NOT bugs, but merely issues to follow up (and accumulated from NT3.51/4.0), just like many "bugs" reported at Bugzilla.

Re:Reminds me of the 65000+ bugs of Win2K

[jgerman]

Not to mention that that's one version of Windows versus the lifetime of mozilla. during which bugs were reported based on constant trial and error of the software in it's current unfinished state. And if you understoof the workings of bugzilla at all you'd realize that the word bug in this case also includes duplicates, RFE's, feature requests, stuff that isn't a bug in the strictest sense.

Re:This entire story rings hypocritical to me

[GeorgeH]

I said it before and I'll say it again. Win2k shipped with n thousand bugs. Mozilla has 100,000 bugs fixed. Can you see the difference?

Re:This entire story rings hypocritical to me

[DougM]

The difference is that the estimated 64k Windows bugs were actual problems in a released product. BugZilla is a development tracking tool that includes bugs and feature requests in its count.

Let us wait and see how many of the 100,000+ records are still open when mozilla is finally released as 1.0.

Re:This entire story rings hypocritical to me

[Azghoul]

Hmm...

Win2k, 65000 bugs.... RELEASED. People paid money for it (a lot of money in some cases).

Mozilla, 100000 bugs.... still beta. Free. Libre.

STFU. Thank you.

If it only looked more professional

[sunking2]

This is the problem with alot of OS software, it simply looks, and in this case sounds, unprofessional. I mean, what kind of name is bugzilla and what is the deal with the silly red barnie wannabe graphics. Have you seen the web pages? They are absolutely godawful ugly. You goto the report section and some of the output criteria are things like 'most doomed', and 'most recently doomed'. I'm supposed to sell this product to a bunch of manager types? I know, everything is html and can be changed to do what we want, but then my free product isn't being very free, is it.

This isn't meant to be a flame. I'm simply pointing out yet again what many people have said. Open Source is terrible at getting the last mile done. Although it may be evil, marketing works. If you want something to be used, you have to present it well. Until that happens people will just keep turning to Rational ClearQuest, even tho it costs money.

Re:If it only looked more professional

[Gerv]

> but then my free product isn't being very free, is it.

Free software != Someone else does all the work for you. It's free (libre).

> Open Source is terrible at getting the last mile done.

If your company doesn't use Bugzilla because it judges on appearances rather than function, do you think we give a monkey's? :-) It's your loss.

Gerv

Re:If it only looked more professional

[willfe]

This is so true.

Where I used to work, a system was put in place (closed-source, Windows only, required a special client to access that was also Windows only) that didn't serve anyone's needs but was the "pet favorite" of the management staff who either got kickbacks for using and pushing the product or just ignored the input of all their employees and went with their first choice for egotistical or idiocy purposes.

Hearing the constant complaints, I (the senior sysadmin), installed Bugzilla. Despite its ugly query form, people loved it and immediately began using it.

Management took interest in it and immediately started complaining about it. Every piece of FUD that's ever been used against an open-source product was thrown at it. It turned personal; the managers of one of the groups actually *ordered* her employees not to use Bugzilla.

I redesigned the look of the tool (it took a day of work to completely redesign all the forms, report pages, and search pages), and more people started using it after the changes because it became easy to use. I enabled the e-mail feature (to e-mail updates and new bugs to the system).

It kicked ass, did everything the management wanted it to do, and it cost much less.

The layoff rounds that hit the company last month didn't spare me; I'm sure my involvement in getting Bugzilla rolled out played some role in their decision to lay off the only system administrator they had in the office (whoops :). When I left, the system Bugzilla was meant to replace was still in operation (servers still running, etc.).

Not one trouble ticket has been created in that old system for almost a year; from what people have told me since I left, that hasn't changed.

Bugzilla also sits in a state of disuse; it turns out the "battle" between the Bugzilla "fans" (and its maintainer/evangelist :) and the management was so annoying to everyone, that the entire office chose to give up trying to track problems altogether rather than having anyone admit they're wrong.

I really hate corporate politics; it kills good products.

And, btw, if you don't like how Bugzilla looks, go change it. You're spot on about this; the fact that it's free and open-sourced doesn't mean somebody on the development team is going to spend a day/week/month customizing it to your exact specifications.

It's HTML, for fsck's sake; it's not that hard to change. And I made some pretty drastic changes to Bugzilla's appearance. It didn't take very long.

Re:If it only looked more professional

[allanj]

I agree completely - but since Bugzilla is licensed under MPL 1.1, you don't mind sharing your improvements with the rest of us? We could really use a bug-tracking system where I work, and Bugzilla is just fine - except for the god-awful UI. I *know* it's HTML and I know my way around HTML just fine, but seeing how this is Open Source I'd rather start from where you have gotten than from where plain Bugzilla starts off. If it's too tailored to your (previous) company, so be it - but I really like the idea of starting at a higher level, and maybe getting inspired by seeing several solutions to the same problem.

There's a difference between scalability...

[dave-fu]

...and disk space. 100,000 concurrent users? That's scalability. 100,000 bugs? That's disk space.
You'd do well to think a moment before putting the most positive spin possible on your pet projects and display a little objectivity.

Re:Nothing to be proud about.

[CH-BuG]

I've installed tinderbox and bonsai where I work and it works just fine. Is tinderbox2 worth the upgrade ?

illiterate?

[Ender Ryan]

You are commenting on this when you didn't even finish reading the SUMMARY!

Mozilla DOES NOT HAVE 100,000 BUGS!

Thoughout the whole development process, 100,00 bugs have passed through the Mozilla code, this includes integration of new features where things aren't finished and don't work right, and well, everything else that gets put into bugzilla.

W2k was released with 20+k bugs in the finished product. But, who knows what those bugs are anyway, I've see plenty, but that large number could include things that most wouldn't consider to be real bugs, so, whatever...

Re:illiterate?

[Quarters]

I never said that Mozilla has 100,000 bugs. I said that people are crowing about a bug tracking system that can handle the 100,000 bugs that have been reported for Mozilla.

illiterate (-ltr-t)
adj.

Unable to read and write.
Nope. I can do that just fine. I can manage it without using all caps too.

Having little or no formal education.
My two college degrees are enough to refute that

Marked by inferiority to an expected standard of familiarity with language and literature.
Still not germane to what I wrote

Violating prescribed standards of speech or writing.
I will admit to making spelling errors now and again. That's not quite the same as illiteracy, though

What was your point again?

Mozilla has gone through 100,000 bugs?

[Zocalo]

Who let Microsoft onto the development team?

Oh, wait, these have been fixed before shipping the "final product", haven't they?

Kudos to Bugzilla for coping with it though, I can see the ad slogan now; "Can cope with projects buggier than Windows NT!"

Re:This entire story rings hypocritical to me

[WWWWolf]

Win2K shipped with all those zillions bugs unfixed.

Only a fraction of the 100000 Mozilla bugs are "open issues". The rest are fixed bugs, duplicates, invalid bug reports, as of yet unfulfilled feature requests and, in some cases, jokes. =)

(It's good to see that "the lack of [some cool feature] bugs me" is considered a program bug, not an user's fault =)

Presumably the point is scale of use

[Spinality]

I don't think anybody suggested that the 100K reports were processed in parallel. But my take-away is that a sizeable community of developers and users generated and managed 100K distinct trouble-tickets. This indicates to me that the tool is sufficiently robust for use in a large-scale 'industrial strength' development effort. Other tools may work well enough for tracking a few hundred issues/requests/bugs but don't provide enough method and structure for a large collaborative effort.

So I don't think this post lacked objectivity, at least not for that particular reason.

The Bugzilla Installer

[nn4l]

Bugzilla is somewhat difficult to install. I have written a few shell scripts that help install Bugzilla on any UNIX system.

This article has detailed instructions and all required source code: The Bugzilla Installer

The Bugzilla Installer will unpack, compile and install Bugzilla and all required components on a UNIX system. Administrator rights are not required; you can install everything in an arbitrary location. It has been tested on different Sun Solaris and Linux installations.

Just missed it... 100,001th.

[Down8]

Man, I noticed this last night, when I submitted a bug, I got the 100,001st one. I think mine is more useful than the 100,000st anyway - at least it's symmetrical. ;^P [Not that they aren't all important.]

Go BugZilla, go BugZilla. It's your bugday, it's your bugday....

-bZj

Bug are bad

[asciimonster]

This is probably going to cost me some carma, but what the heck:

Councellor McKee:
"Listen kids and listen good. I'm only going to say this once: Bug are baaaaad. Okay? But mozilla is goood. But mozilla has a lot of bugs, which is bad. Mmm-Okay? They now got more than 100,000, which is really bad. That why they fix bugs. Fixing bugs is good. Mmm-Okay? That's why mozilla is better than microsoft. Okay? But somethimes mozilla misses a bug. That bad. Okay? That's why reporing a bug is good. Okay? You report a bug, which is bad, to mozilla so they can fix it, which is good. Okay?"

Stan: "Mister McKee?"
Coucellor McKee: "Yes son?"
Stan: "Why is it that reporting bugs is good and reporting people is bad?"
Councellor McKee: "Erm. I don't now actually"

German Bank here

[jawtheshark]

I work for a fairly large German Bank (I can't tell you which one for obvious reasons) and before we had just verbal communication and eventual email between testers and developers (me being developer) on a fairly large eBanking application. It was a complete mess.

Fortunately we got a project manager with some sense and it seems quite he has some influence on the internal IT managers (damnit, it's a bank, they are really paranoid...they refuse nearly anything we ask for!) and we used Bugzilla in the second phase of the project. Developers and testers loved it, tough testers were first pissed because they had to do more effort, but when they saw the quick results they were converted in no-time.
Gotta love Bugzilla, I'll recommend it to any project :-))

Re:German Bank here

[spectatorion]

I work for a fairly large German Bank (I can't tell you which one for obvious reasons)

I don't think the reasons are obvious. Just out of curiosity, tell me (us) why you cannot disclose where you work. thank you.

Re:bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforg

[Earlybird]

There are not that many around. Before we submitted to Bugzilla, we looked at several systems (late last year), such as Mantis, GNATS, Jitterbug, and Keystone. I have nothing great to say about any of them.

They all lack many essential features. They all have web-based GUIs that are tighly coupled with the back-end logic; that is, they have no back ends. Thus the default GUI is the only GUI you can ever realistically put on top of it. A lot of people are missing out on the MVC model these days. What you need is a programmable back end accessible through a cross-platform API (based on CORBA, SOAP, XML-RPC, UNO, anything that strikes your fancy). Then you can leverage the back-end support for clients. One can be a powerful reporting tool with graphing capabilities. Another one can be a wxWindows-based portable GUI for modern desktops. Another one can be a common-denominator HTML-based GUI for browsers. Etc.

Current GUIs are all crude and cluttered and obviously designed by programmers with no interface design background (and by that I don't mean graphical design, but functional design). Many are ad-hoc systems thrown together using PHP. Presumably the poor devils think that by slapping it on SourceForge or Freshmeat it will magically bloom into a usable product. Nuh-uh.

Another common problem with these systems is that they're fundamentally bug-tracking systems. When you get to a certain point in development, you realize that a better all-embracing concept is the idea of issues -- a generalization of problems that aren't specifically related to code. There is a popular fork of Bugzilla, for example, called IssueZilla.

The only system that was mildly interesting was Keystone, which provides some interesting form-based extensibility -- basically, if I remember correctly, the schema is malleable, so you can add stuff like time estimation numbers, completion progress, or other metadata that would be useful in your project. Also Keystone supports the notion of subtasks: any bug "slip" can have another slip as its parent. This is more elegant than Bugzilla's dependency system. Unfortunately, Keystone sports a GUI from hell. (Applying CSS to it might sound fun, but it isn't; their HTML isn't very CSS-friendly, so to do anything radical you have to delve into their HTML generation code).

We currently use Bugzilla. It's currently the best system out there, but that doesn't say much. We are pretty excited about Scarab -- this is a project where the developers actually sat down and designed it beforehand (wowee).

Contributing to Bugzilla ...

[MattyT]

And for something constructive for a change, I'll tell you how you can contribute to Bugzilla.

The project's home page is "http://www.mozilla.org/projects/bugzilla/". Most of the developers hang out on the IRC channel.

It's perpetually in beta.

[glrotate]

Thats an easy cop out. So basicaly they are admitting that it's so buggy that it will never be finished. Think about it, a company with the resources of AOL/TIME-WARNER can't get this turd out of their ass after 4 years.

Microsoft's Bug System

[Simm0]

As both a developer for Mozilla and a tester for MS's WindowsXP I must say that ms's bug reporting system is extreemely bad. At the start of the test is wasn't even possible to delete or modify your own bugs. I cant even comprahend the amount of duplicate bugs created due to its closed nature. It took many months even to get a bug validated all mostly returning "Wont Fix".
Well done Mozilla team at another fine product.

any program

[dollargonzo]

...has at least one bug. Although 100,000 seems like a very large number, and so ~11000, which is the actually open bug count excluding feature requests, duplicates etc, for the size of mozilla, its really not that bad. A lot of these bugs are also linked to each other and therefore are not really separate bugs, but rather a few lines of incorrect code affecting many different modules. In mozilla's many lines of code (can anyone warrant a guess or have an exact number?), 11000 bugs do however amount to a bug per not-very-many lines. for 110,000 lines of code, there would be a bug on average every 10 lines of code.
Hmmm, maybe time to rethink how well ppl write software these days...

:-(

Re:any program

[jgerman]

#!/usr/bin/perl

The above script has NO bugs. Therefore any program does not necessaruly have at least one bug. QED.

Re:any program

[Tarkwyn]

#!/usr/bin/perl
The above script has NO bugs. Therefore any program does not necessaruly have at least one bug. QED.

I can't get this to work under windows - can anyone help? Where should I submit this bug? Hy, nw my kybrd s brkn! Pls hlp...

Re:bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforg

[GuavaBerry]

I have better things to do with my time than waste it trying to use HTML and HTTP as a user interface.

and yet you find time every week or so to rant via slashdot's html/http interface. :)

Re:Nothing to be proud about.

[Doc Hopper]

If you already have Tinderbox running, I would see no reason to upgrade to Tinderbox2 (and neither does the Mozilla team at the moment). The biggest deal is that T2 is relatively easy to customize for third-party developers outside of mozilla.org. Eventually, I think Tinderbox2 development will surpass the original Tinderbox. Tinderbox(1) has a whole lot of mozilla-specific stuff in the way it works. T2 is a whole lot more generic, and seems quite expandable. I encourage you to give it a shot, but if yours isn't broke...

Perfect Use for SOAP!

[EXTomar]

Here is a chance for Bugzilla to take a quantum step beyond other bug tracking software. If any of the bugzilla maintainers are reading this please consider adding SOAP API to bugzilla as a neutral and independant way to manipulate bugzilla instalations. This way you can design any GUI you want while talking to the same server software.

It seems that usually the next step after designing a robust web server application platform is to somehow externalize functionality so that things that aren't web browsers can use it as well. Go for it Bugzilla!

Re:Perfect Use for SOAP!

[JourneymanMereel]

To me, SOAP is something I use every morning in the shower... guess I should read up and see what SOAP is and how it works... right now the Bugzilla logic and interface are tied together pretty tightly. There is work being do to seperate the two, but until that is done, adding another interface is quite difficult.

"BUGS" is a vague term

[PenguiN42]

This is why in many professional projects they like to stay away from the term "bug" -- using the terms "errors" and "defects" instead.

Errors-- bugs found before project release (presumably fixed)

Defects-- bugs found after project release.

This story is talking about 100,000 errors that have been found in the under-development mozilla. Previous stories about 65000 win2k bugs were about defects in the shipped win2k product. If distinctions like this were more common, we wouldn't be having so many problems with people confusing the two.

Re:bugzilla vs. debian bug tracking vs. sourceforg

[Doc Hopper]

You *can* do this in Bugzilla, but you need to enable the contributed Bugzilla Mail Interface in contrib/. That contributed package is in some need of maintenance, however.
Check here or here for details.

Re:This entire story rings hypocritical to me

[TheAwfulTruth]

Actually those 100,000 bugs are NOT all "fixed". And every version that has been released has had thousands of open bugs in it. In fact when it (ever) reaches 1.0 it will still probably have hundreds if not thousands of open "bugs". And that's JUST THE BROWSER!!!! Win2k is a browser and about 100x more.

82,000 of 100,000 Bugzilla reports RESOLVED

[asa]

from my report to mozillazine.org:

The recent posting to slashdot about Bugzilla's 100,000th report begs the question, "what other numbers can you give me?" Here are a few of the numbers I pulled out of the database last night. These numbers are all a little rough but should help make the picture a little more clear. About 18.7% of the reports in Bugzilla are still open (UNCONFIRMED, NEW, ASSIGNED, and REOPENED) issues. About 32.8% of the reports have the FIXED Resolution. About 45.4% of the reports in the system are WORKSFORME, INVALID or DUPLICATE. To break that last number down a little more, 26.3% of the database is Resolved as DUPLICATE, 12% WORKSFORME and 7.5% INVALID. About 5.5% of reports in the system are reported against something other than the Mozilla application suite.

So just in case anyone missed it in the fine print, Bugzilla has 100,000+ reports but the Mozilla community has already resolved about 82,000 of those reports. It's probably also useful to know that there are over 32,000 Buzilla user accounts. You can find more on the Mozilla QA and testing community at my O'Reilly OSS Convention presentation (you'll want to use a browser that supports the latest web standards.)

Re:good thing?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

I fail to see how this is a good thing for Mozilla, or Bugzilla. How many bugs are in the latest version of IE? It seems kind of silly to be proclaiming this as a great proof of the scalability of Mozilla. If MS were proclaiming, "We just fixed the 10,000th bug in IE 6.0!", people would do nothing but talk about how the software should have been thoroughly tested, and there should have been NO bugs!

The scalability argument was for Bugzilla.

Nobody expects microsoft to sell bug-free software, but we do expect them to do at least as good a job as a group of volunteers do. I mean, come on. Some of those programmers/QA people at MS are earning six figures (or more for some guys) per year and a group of volunteers has a better system for resolving post-release bugs than them.

If MS had a PUBLIC bug-database where we could at a minimum report all the problems with Windows or IE it would go a long way.

Maybe the Justice Department should make them do something like this as part of a settlement?

Maybe pigs will fly.

many companies have these

[buzzini]

Microsoft has an internal tool called Raid that tracks bugs too. It's pretty slick, has a web version, extremely feature rich, etc. I'm sure dozens of other companies have developed these as well.

Blake

BugZilla's features

[erc]

Sorry, but BugZill's emailing features are in several commercial products - I was putting in "email on change" code in help desk apps I was writing back in 1998, so it's hardly a new or novel idea.

At SMI, our internal help desk also has "email on change" code - it even emails everyone a clickable link to go directly to the bug report.

Re:scalability

[marick]

...and that can basically amount to a denial-of-service attack.

Unfortunately for me, I discovered this effect last year at school. I was doing a project on Mozilla's first 30 months (or so), and I decided to grab the entire bug database, one bug per thread, 25 threads at a time. Big mistake.

Soon I had swamped the entire server (load > 100) and my account was revoked. Oops. Needless to say, I was embarassed...

blah

[Ender Ryan]

You were implying that Mozilla had more bugs than Win2K, which would seem to be false, as Win2K was released as a final product while it still had ~65K bugs, and Mozilla, still in development, has 100,000 bug reports which are from internal development and duplicate bug reports, meaning the number of actual bugs is much much less than that.

But then you must define "bug" and compare how both companies define "bug", it's a worthless thing to speculate about. However, Win2K was released with quite a number of bugs, from my personal experience, which is all I can go on at this point.

I'm sorry, what was my point again? Oh yeah, your original post was simply pretty dumb...

Not Necessarily Scalable!

[4of12]

Just because Bugzilla works well for a large project like Mozilla with many developers and many reported bugs does not necessarily qualify it for "scalable".

It only proves its utility for a particular large project.

My group has been looking to find a good bug management system that is truly scalable. By that I mean one that works as easily for a small project with a few developers as for a very large project.

The differences are that a very large project might be able to afford to have one person whose full time activity is managing some piece of complex bug tracking or issue management software, be it some commercial offering or be it Bugzilla.

I am so tired of products being sold and bought purely on the long list of "features" without any regard for usability. Can anyone produce a product with an appreciation that the casual user, reporting a bug once for some piece of software, does not want to be overburdened in having to spend hours or days climbing the learning curve for Yet Another Software Application.

Scalability to the low end as well as the high end wins marks in my book.

While I've been skeptical of Bugzilla for being no more than a Pile 'O Perl Scripts, I must admit it is doing well for Mozilla, having used it once to submit a bug and gotten subsequent emails indicating the progress being made on the bug (even if the progress was a message to the effect that the bug was morally equivalent to something else and that I was too stupid to realize it - that's OK).

But has Bugzilla been used successfully for smaller projects? And for users/bug reporters that are not necessarily the same as developers?

Re:Not Necessarily Scalable!

[duckyd]

I have used Bugzilla in a small (6 people) development team, and it worked very well. Additionally, other employees of the company who were not developers had no trouble learning how to file bug reports, etc. Getting them to write good, detailed bug reports was a different story, but that's not Bugzilla's fault. All in all I'd say it's a really decent piece of software, though if you want to alter its functionality you will find the source an ugly mess...

Re:Not Necessarily Scalable!

[jesser]

But has Bugzilla been used successfully for smaller projects? And for users/bug reporters that are not necessarily the same as developers?

I don't know how many small projects use Bugzilla, but I can answer your second question. Mozilla has many bug reporters and other QA volunteers who are not developers. QA for Mozilla includes marking identical bugs as duplicates, noting when two bugs are similar (as comments in each bug report), and making sure "fixed" bugs have actually been fixed.

That's not to say that bugzilla has a great UI, but it is possible for non-developers to use it.

Mozilla is a shame for opensource

[Ilgaz]

Let me try to be informative...

First of all, MS in Turkey, shows mozilla as an example of failure of opensource... I know this from one to one contacts with my friends...

--- Cannot join #mozilla (You are banned).

Hmm this too... They did everything to make people away... Like insulting people that they are end users, they don't have a clue...

To be straight, they made everything to make end users away from their project (or geek project I say)

I as a turkish was insulted too much on irc.mozilla.org for instance, they asked me if there are any people in Turkey who installed mozilla... Just to bash... :-(

But same time, my friends at Turkish goverment science division were working on turkish version of mozilla...

Mozilla will never make it just because it isn't democratic enough to take critism...

"Quality thru testing" == fallacy

[jlusk4]

ok, ok, i'll write some sort of body to get around the lameness filter

not sure I need to expand on the subject line, though.

At the Mozilla party tonight...

[CaptTrips]

...folks will be passing out cans of beer and yelling "This bugs for you".

hmm

[panic911]

Yeah, I don't know if this is something to be proud of :p

XP != 95,98 etc

[grepnyc]

>>Windows XP = Windows 95 v5.0
95->98->98se->me->XP!

Isn't XP derived from the NT source code?

Unless Micro$oft is lying, the 95ish source code has been left behind.

pressure/grep

Re:good thing?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Most new Microsoft products have a bug tracking feature BUILT INTO THE SOFTWARE, so users simply have to click a button to report a bug and the system automatically sends relivant information in a completely secure and private way.

No personal information is sent, and all the user has to do is click a button.

Oh... look, a swine just launched past my window. Moron.

Hmm...They just added a feature Netscape and Winamp have had for years now. Way to innovate, boys.

Also, please email me a link to the place on Microsoft's web site where I can search through an interactive, live bug database? I'd like to check that out...

Doesn't matter when bugs are ignored

[slashdot2.2sucks]

There are about 4 versions of the same bug report that has been in Mozilla Bugzilla for years. (This bug doesn't exist in Nescape 4). It just keeps getting ignored, and if it is ever fixed, someone comes in and immediately changes it back.

If you block a server, say doubleclick, Mozilla will pops up extremely annoying alerts telling you that the server can't be found. Mozilla does this even though it shouldn't be downloading images or JS from off-page servers. This "feature" should be completely disabled, or there should be a "fuck off" checkbox.

Cause celebre?

[bnitsua]

Oh, sure! When Mozilla hits 100,000 bugs everyone celebrates, but when Microsoft Windows hits 100,000 bugs, no one cares. Er, wait, they did celebrate--wasn't that the release of Windows 98?

100,000 Features!

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I thought /. was harping on Microsoft for shipping a product with thousands of STILL OPEN bugs.

Yep.

But given that the count includes new features, it would be as valid to proclaim that Mozilla had 100,000 new features, then start deducting the bugs.

Besides: A documeted bug IS a "feature". Right? B-)

Oh, and the quote is "Foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds."

A non-rational quote used (from the first time it was uttered) to avoid valid arguments in debate by belittling those who make them.

I prefer a slight rearrangement: "Inconsistency is the mind of a foolish little hobgoblin."

More like nt6 I'm afraid.

[Penguinoflight]

too bad they still can't get anything right.

Re:They mean...

[-brazil-]

No, moron. The 100,000 is the project total, including duplicates and resolved bugs.

Bugzilla Works!

[journalistguy]

Unfortunately, the product it was designed to help (Mozilla) remains a bloated, steaming pile of canine feces. After trying every possible flavour of browser, I'll stick with IE, thank you.

Re:Wow....big deal!

[-brazil-]

Congrats, this is the dumbest comment on this story so far. Go back to your VisualBasic dabbling and leave real programming to people who know that being able to count to a certain number has nothing whatsoever to with having a database that scales to that number of entries - and even less with having a system that enables its users to efficiently work on such a large number of reported issues without overwhelming them.

Re:good thing?

[w_crossman]

Let's see. That is only for the XP Beta, and people can't read existing reports, as I recall. Reporting something to Microsoft is always a black box. It goes in, but nothing seems to happen. Besides, even if it gets a fix, you won't get an update for free. You might see the fix in XP2, but you'll have to shell money out for it.

Some might say that Netscape is the same way. It used to be, but things have changed. They used to be like Microsoft, but their market share reduction hit hard, and it seemed to make them smarter. They've grown up, so to speak (even under AOL/TW!).

Re:good thing?

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Let's see. That is only for the XP Beta, and people can't read existing reports, as I recall. Reporting something to Microsoft is always a black box. It goes in, but nothing seems to happen. Besides, even if it gets a fix, you won't get an update for free. You might see the fix in XP2, but you'll have to shell money out for it.

Some might say that Netscape is the same way. It used to be, but things have changed. They used to be like Microsoft, but their market share reduction hit hard, and it seemed to make them smarter. They've grown up, so to speak (even under AOL/TW!)

Indeed. Also, even though I've ALREADY supplied a bunch of personal information to MS to get a passport account, for some reason I was prompted with a giant form asking for lots of personal info to get access to the "Beta" web site.

Great website. Still pales in comparison to Bugzilla, me thinks.

The reason.

[jawtheshark]

Simple: I signed a contract that binds me to the fact that I cannot tell anything about what happens at work. This includes what systems are used. Banking secrecy is quite harsh in some countries, you know. I know that in the context of Bugzilla this sounds ridiculous.

Technically I violate the contract I signed by sharing some information on slashdot (even if it is for the good of the community), but then I do not share the name of the bank nor you know who I am. You only know that Bugzilla is used in a fairly large geman bank on a certain ebanking project and that jawtheshark works or has been working on that project. Quite vague, isn't it? (Note that I posted this from the bank's network and hence I'm monitored...it's just to avoid trouble for me...really)