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

features...

[frakir]

"...the ability to create and edit bugs via email."
Love it.

Re:features...

[kongit]

Windows has had this ability for some time now, catch up oss.

I found a major bug in bugzilla

[iamacat]

But it crashes when I try to submit it. Oh well.

Re:What, why?

[Knuckles]

What does it do that make it deserve a mention

It's the bugtracker that is used by most major FOSS projects.

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..

[moranar]

Ahem. The normal userbase of a bug tracking program is not composed of coders and engineers?

Don't rewrite from scratch

[RedMagic]

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.

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:Where are the perlheads?

[renoX]

Well for me, the more I used Perl, the less I liked it so I'm not surprised that Perl's popularity has faded..

When I was taught Perl, I thought 'cool a better, more powerful, portable shell' and then I had to maintain Perl's code, some written by beginners and some by 'experts'.. And I discovered what a mess Perl is..

Sure it's portable but the language don't give you the correct defaults so beginners code is usually awful AND experienced Perl coders let them sucked by TWTDI which makes their code hard to maintain by anybody else..

It takes *a lot* of self-discipline to write maintainable/readable Perl, so not surprisingly lots of Perl code is junk.

Hating Perl, I looked for another language and found Ruby which unfortunately I don't use that much as my boss won't let me do it (not widespread enough for him), *sigh* such a beautiful language and having to use shell or Perl instead..

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Bugzilla has two search screens, one simplified and one advanced. Though I can tell you I am one of the few people who actually searches for bug report for a major (and I mean major) Free software project. Most users just file the bugs and I (and sometime when I am sleeping, others) close bug reports as being duplicated. The major problem I have found with bug tracking systems so having too many of them.
At work, I use 4 different bug databases, 3 of them are bugzilla and one a home grown one. Moving bugs from one database to another is annoying, though I only have to move them from one bugzilla to another (actually to upstream). The developer support team moves the one from the home grown database to bugzilla (though sometimes forgetting one important piece of information that I have to go searching for).

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.