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.

Comments

Compared to test director..

[k1980pc]

[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.

Re:Compared to test director..

[cerberusss]

Yeah well if you start talking that way.... I'm using the version control utility subversion at work which doesn't have much of an interface by default (except a commandline one).

Now I've heard about the graphical client SvnTortoise or something, but my point is: I'd rather stab my eyes out that going back to that slow piece of shit Perforce.

So I ask you: please, UI is important, but it's only one of many features.

Where are the perlheads?

[jsebrech]

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?

Re:What, why?

[orra]

used by most major FOSS projects.

This is kind of worrying. See, unlike Firefox and Thunderbird, Bugzilla is only licensed under the MPL. Debian considers the MPL non-free, at least because it requires that source code be available at least six months after you stop distributing a binary, if you distribute the binary over a network. This is considered too onerous a restriction, as unavoidable circumstances (e.g. a Slashdotting) might prevent the availability of the source code. [Note that the GPL does not require this: if you distribute source code side-by-side with binaries, you can stop distributing both at the same time].

I've not got anything against Bugzilla as an application besides this freeness issue. I've used it for GNOME bugtracking, and it seems quite, er, good.

Trac is da bomb

[cerberusss]

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.

Re:Trac is da bomb

[AlXtreme]

I completely agree with you on this one. After trying Trac out a few years ago, I haven't looked back. Besides for personal and university projects, I've been using separate Trac-installs for clients. Everything from support requests to development projects end up as tickets, with wiki pages for additional details and background information.

The main reason why Trac is so successful is indeed the flat learning curve / simple interface. Two sentences along the lines of "If you add a new ticket here, I'll get right on it" are enough. Clients happy because they can easily bug me and have an overview of past tickets, I'm happy because of the decrease of postit's on my monitor.

Oh, Bugzilla you ask? I've had to deal with it in the past for a few OSS projects. I'm still scared of it, and wouldn't let my clients near it even if they begged me. It might be more useful when you have hundreds of technical users working on a single project with needs like reporting and time tracking, but for anything less a more flexible alternative is preferable, IMHO.

Re:Trac is da bomb

[foniksonik]

I'm still scared of it, and wouldn't let my clients near it even if they begged me. It might be more useful when you have hundreds of technical users working on a single project with needs like reporting and time tracking, but for anything less a more flexible alternative is preferable, IMHO.

This is so interesting.... something must have changed at say 2.2 or 2.3 cause back at 2.16 of Bugzilla I as a designer with about 6 months or perl exposure (but plenty of html + css + javascript) went in to the Bugzilla UI pages (search, reports, etc.) and completely customized them for a company with about 35 devs at the time. I was 'the web guy' at the time. They all coded in C++ primarily.

I created a bunch of canned queries in a select menu, plus a quick search that had better defaults. A better default search page with info and a layout that actually meant something for the devs rather than being generic but consistent with other Bugzilla installs. Added color coding and collapsible lists to the results pages, and more..... it really wasn't that complicated to make changes... the html in perl is still html so creating a better UI was a matter of looking at source for Bugzilla output in the browser and then doing a global find on the Bugzilla web dir with an html snippet or css class or something as my search.

Re:What, why?

[spiffyman]

A little clicking around in the GP's link renders the following: "If it's MPL *only*, you'll have to reject if it's targetted for main. If, like firefox and friends, it's multi-licensed, then it's fine." Also, this: "It is, in fact, not distributable as an executable by Debian."

I'm not involved in Debian, but that's a pretty resounding set of rejections. If you read the whole thread (here, find "MPL") you can see one or two dissenting opinions, but the "reject" option does seem to be the consensus view. And since BugZilla is MPL-only, it looks like distributing it as a binary will not be an option for Debian maintainers.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether Debian can go ahead and distribute the source. This would be a PITA for developers, but it's better than nothing.