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After 9 Years, Bugzilla Moves Up to 3.0
BuggyUser writes "Bugzilla, the popular application to track and manage software development bug reports, has moved up to version 3.0. The 2.x series has been in service for the last nine years. From the article: 'According to the Bugzilla 3.0 release announcement, some of the new features in this version include custom fields, support for the Apache mod_perl module, per-product permissions, an XML-RPC interface, and the ability to create and edit bugs via email. A demo site has been set up where users can test the new version before downloading.'" Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.
"...the ability to create and edit bugs via email."
Love it.
that when reported via bugzilla, prevents the report from being seen?
What does it do that make it deserve a mention as opposed to the other zillion bug tracking systems? The site says they don't support their own language choice any longer.
But it crashes when I try to submit it. Oh well.
I bet they are still using v2 for the bug tracking for v3
[rant:begin]
I find bugzilla lacking in polish..Been using the test director for quite a long time at work and it seems very slick. I have used bugzilla only a few times [have raised some of the early ubuntu-vmware issues ]. Interestingly, feature by feature, it holds ground against the more [very] expensive counterpart. Bugzilla works well with firefox and safari - which I guess Test director may not due to few activex dependencies.
The reason why I felt this was I suggested bugzilla to a colleague in a different organisation and they were far from satisfied. A more intuitive gui and some pleasing css works would have saved the day for bugzilla.
Come to think of it, I could say that against many of the projects(FOSS in particular)... A bit more effort on UX could make a world of difference. Been testing office 2007 last few weeks and I'm very impressed. Just one of the apps in recent times whose UI made me feel why didn't I think of it. Just a pity that the guys who made Office 2007 were not more involved with Vista.
Now off to some much needed sleep....
[/rant:end]
PS - Most of the comments above are subjective and anecdotal - Your experience and opinions might differ and I can live with it.
http://www.fogbugz.com/ -- best bug tracker ever
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
"and the ability to *create* and edit bugs via email."
;-)
Is that *really* such a good idea, I wonder?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Bugzilla's 9-year-road to 3.0 is a good example of why code should very rarely been rewritten from scratch and even if, then never the whole codebase. The more ambitious the goal one tries to achieve by that the harder the task - especially if one needs to keep updating the old codebase. There is no code which cannot be iteratively improved to achieve whatever the fresh code is suppose to.
It is amazing that the quick and dirty bug tracking tool that Terry wrote for the browser group would last so long, and that the design has not really change through all the years.
The article mentions the fact that bugzilla's release manager wants to see it rewritten in some other language because in his opinion perl is no longer a good language to be writing large applications in. I expected to go into the comments and see nothing but outraged reactions from perl lovers, because that's what I would have seen 5 years ago.
Where has all the perl love gone?
Nowadays, the sysadmins have installed Trac for us. Works very good, with integrated Wiki and all that jazz. I don't know how it stands up featurewise against Bugzilla, but Trac has a very flat learning curve. For instance, searching is one box. One search box. Compare that to the humongous Bugzilla search screen.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Specifically in this case it seems that of the 17 available localizations only Japanese in an initial release form is currently available for the 3.0 version. The most recent available Polish versions are for 2.20 and 2.18 which is as fresh as any other localized package apart from Japanese. This is another example of localization trailing development instead of being integrated with it. (Reference: bugzilla download localizations)
I am confused here. Are you joking or you really thought it is about localization? The GP meant the look and feel. But if it is meant to be funny, good one mate......and apologies for slightly spoiling it :)
Every damn Bugzilla insists that I make an account. I don't want any more accounts!!!
I don't have any sort of account with Debian, yet I can file bugs and comment on bugs. It's easy, so they get lots of good bug reports from me. Likewise for the kernel, because they take bugs on an unrestricted mailing list.
With Bugzilla and restricted mailing lists, usually I just don't bother. Screw them. If they wanted bug reports, they wouldn't have made filing bug reports a pain in the ass.
So... will it be easy like Debian? I'm betting not. An account is surely required.
It's only an AE away from GOATSE. Coincidence?
Could it be that Duke Nukem Forever will be released soon?
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Where has all the perl love gone?
.war that you can just drop into tomcat and go, but java application packaging has traditionally been a really sore spot for admins.
Unlike Python or Ruby on Rails, one is not required to swear a blood oath to evangelize Perl at every opportunity to be a Perl hacker. So, the Perl lovers are probably off writing code instead of doing songs and dances here on Slashdot. Its evangelized in a more sublime way - working code. Yeah, that's probably not as effective marketing in today's "ooh, shiny" society.
I'm not sure what the release manager is thinking. Perl 5 hasn't changed drastically in quite a while so his 'no longer' thing doesn't make alot of sense unless he's contrasting with something else he has in mind (and thus he should just say so).
The 'killer-app' for Perl is mod_perl, which this version of Bugzilla finally uses. Without checking the dates, I'm pretty sure mod_perl was available when Bugzilla 2.0 was released, but the Bugzilla code-base was such a steaming pile of hackery (perhaps the right design given requirements) that Bugzilla has been unusable on mod_perl for all of its 9 years. I think I've been watching the "clean up Bugzilla so it runs on mod_perl" bug since I opened a Mozilla Bugzilla account in the late 90's, and it's only received any attention in the past couple years. Kudos to whomever finally 'got it'. If somebody can let me know who that was I'd like to send flowers, chocolate or beer.
So, the Bugzilla code is now cleaned up, designed for proper OOP for the first time, today. It's not even reasonable to talk about a project being easy to maintain by a large number of people until it has a rudimentary OOP design, so for him to blame the language when it was being used in a 15-year-old manner, is just absurd. He should really evaluate how Bugzilla 3.1 shapes up. I might go try to write a plug-in for it, assuming there's some API documentation. I think many others will now also be unafraid to tackle enhancements. I tried a couple before and ran away in fear (that is fear of the amount of time it would take me to understand 'hello world' in the old regime).
At this point the other option is Java. Python doesn't have a strong web framework yet and is slow (somebody needs to write a LISP compiler for it...), the Ruby interpreter is too slow and mod_ruby is immature, PHP is just a heck of a poor language in the current version (different functions for 'normal' and 'weird' strings, etc.) and even Zend isn't as fast as mod_perl (plus the whole security headache...). Interestingly, if Perl 6 ever shows up, it should be able to run any of the above languages well.
So Java - it's great for deploying large applications, but part of Bugzilla's success has been that it's a small application that's easy to deploy. Maybe they can figure out a way to actually create a
Without being unappreciative of any of the work he's done, the release manager should really be more careful or explicit about what he's saying on this topic. After all, if I think the whole thing is likely to be scrapped, I'm not likely to go start writing plug-ins. A conspiracy theorist might think that was the whole idea.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It takes a lot of self-discipline -- a lot -- to write readable, well-structured English -- even more so than Perl, because it doesn't even have to pass a syntax check -- so not surprisingly, lots of English is junk. Perl purports to be accessible to beginners and experts, and to make easy things easy and difficult things possible, and as a result, it's more feasible to turn a poor design or no design at all into working code (which then serves as a working proof-of-concept for the next redesign).
Then again, maybe this isn't really that unexpected?
P.S. Perl::Critic attempts to alleviate these sorts of problems.
Flyspray is a lightweight and easy to use ticketing system worth checking out. We chose it after reviewing the main choices (bugzilla - too complex, mantis - not powerful enough, etc) available at the time and have been very happy. It has continued to improve nicely since, although development seems to be dragging a bit lately.
http://www.flyspray.org/
"We'd actually prefer if you STOP using Perl. You seem to be giving it a bad name. KTHX, Bye."