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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.
But it crashes when I try to submit it. Oh well.
What does it do that make it deserve a mention
It's the bugtracker that is used by most major FOSS projects.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
[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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Debian does not consider the MPL to be non-free: Debian includes MPL-licensed software like Bugzilla and Firebird in their distribution.
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.
So you can laugh all you want to...
debian-legal is just a discussion mailing lists. The messages posted there do not represent the views of the Debian project.
Actions speak louder than words, and the continued presense of Bugzilla, Firebird and other MPL-licensed packages in main indicate that the project does not consider the MPL to be non-free.
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.
"We'd actually prefer if you STOP using Perl. You seem to be giving it a bad name. KTHX, Bye."