Bugzilla:FAQ
General Questions
Can I try out Bugzilla somewhere?
If you want to take a test ride, there are test installations at http://landfill.bugzilla.org/, ready to play with directly from your browser.
What license is Bugzilla distributed under?
Bugzilla is covered by the Mozilla Public License. See details at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/.
How do I get commercial support for Bugzilla?
http://www.bugzilla.org/support/consulting.html is a list of companies and individuals who have asked us to list them as consultants for Bugzilla.
There are several experienced Bugzilla hackers on the mailing list/newsgroup who are willing to make themselves available for generous compensation. Try sending a message to the mailing list asking for a volunteer.
What major companies or projects are currently using Bugzilla for bug-tracking?
There are dozens of major companies with public Bugzilla sites to track bugs in their products. We have a fairly complete list available on our website at http://bugzilla.org/installation-list/. If you have an installation of Bugzilla and would like to be added to the list, whether it's a public install or not, simply e-mail Gerv <gerv@mozilla.org>.
Who maintains Bugzilla?
A core team, led by Dave Miller (justdave@bugzilla.org).
How does Bugzilla stack up against other bug-tracking databases?
Wikipedia maintains a "comparison of issue tracking systems".
In the experience of Matthew Barnson (the original author of this FAQ), though, Bugzilla offers superior performance on commodity hardware, better price (free!), more developer-friendly features (such as stored queries, email integration, and platform independence), improved scalability, greater flexibility, and superior ease-of-use when compared to commercial bug-tracking software.
If you happen to be a vendor for commercial bug-tracking software, and would like to submit a list of advantages your product has over Bugzilla, simply send it to <documentation@bugzilla.org> and we'd be happy to include the comparison in our documentation.
Why doesn't Bugzilla offer this or that feature or compatibility with this other tracking software?
It may be that the support has not been built yet, or that you have not yet found it. While Bugzilla makes strides in usability, customizability, scalability, and user interface with each release, that doesn't mean it can't still use improvement!
The best way to make an enhancement request is to file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org and set the Severity to 'enhancement'. Your 'request for enhancement' (RFE) will start out in the UNCONFIRMED state, and will stay there until someone with the ability to CONFIRM the bug reviews it. If that person feels it to be a good request that fits in with Bugzilla's overall direction, the status will be changed to NEW; if not, they will probably explain why and set the bug to RESOLVED/WONTFIX. If someone else has made the same (or almost the same) request before, your request will be marked RESOLVED/DUPLICATE, and a pointer to the previous RFE will be added.
Even if your RFE gets approved, that doesn't mean it's going to make it right into the next release; there are a limited number of developers, and a whole lot of RFEs... some of which are quite complex. If you're a code-hacking sort of person, you can help the project along by making a patch yourself that supports the functionality you require. If you have never contributed anything to Bugzilla before, please be sure to read the Developers' Guide and Contributors' Guide before going ahead.
Which versions support MySQL, PostgreSQL and Oracle? What about Sybase/Msql/MSSQL?
MySQL was originally chosen because it is free, easy to install, and was available for the hardware Netscape intended to run it on. This means all Bugzilla versions support MySQL.
Bugzilla 2.20 contains experimental support for PostgreSQL.
Bugzilla 2.22 contains complete, stable support for PostgreSQL. As of this release, using PostgreSQL with Bugzilla should be as stable as using MySQL. If you experience any problems with PostgreSQL compatibility, they will be taken as seriously as if you were running MySQL.
Red Hat once ran a version of Bugzilla that worked on Oracle, but that was long, long ago; that version (Bugzilla 2.8) is now obsolete, insecure, and totally unsupported. In August of 2005, Wim Coekaerts (Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle Corporation) wrote to Dave Miller confirming that Oracle intended to implement and support Bugzilla. Thanks to the help of some Oracle engineers, Bugzilla 3.2 is the first release to support Oracle.
Sybase support is no longer being worked on. Even if it eventually happens, it's VERY unlikely to work without the end-user-company having to stick a few developers on making several manual changes. Sybase is just NOT very standards-compliant (despite all the hype), and it turned out that way too much had to be changed to make it work -- like moving half of the application logic into stored procedures to get any kind of decent performance out of it. Bug 173130 is the relevant bug.
Bug 237862 is a good bug to read through if you'd like to see what progress is being made on general database compatibility.
What is /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl?
Bugzilla used to have the path to perl on the shebang line set to /usr/bonsaitools/bin/perl because when Terry first started writing the code for mozilla.org he needed a version of Perl and other tools that were completely under his control. This location was abandoned for the 2.18 release in favor of the more sensible /usr/bin/perl. If you installed an older version of Bugzilla and created the symlink we suggested, you can remove it now (provided that you don't have anything else, such as Bonsai, using it and you don't intend to reinstall an older version of Bugzilla).
My perl is located at /usr/local/bin/perl and not /usr/bin/perl. Is there an easy to change that in all the files that have this hard-coded?
The easiest way to get around this is to create a link from one to the other: ln -s /usr/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl. If that's not an option for you, the following bit of perl magic will change all the shebang lines (that is to say, the line at the top of each file that starts with '#!' and contains the path) to something else:
perl -pi -e 's@#\!/usr/bin/perl@#\!/usr/local/bin/perl@' *cgi *pl
Sadly, this command-line won't work on Windows unless you also have Cygwin. However, MySQL comes with a binary called replace which can do the job:
C:\mysql\bin\replace "#!/usr/bin/perl" "#!C:\perl\bin\perl" -- *.cgi *.pl
If your perl path is something else again, just follow the above examples and replace /usr/local/bin/perl with your own perl path.
Once you've modified all your files, you'll also need to modify the t/002goodperl.t test, as it tests that all shebang lines are equal to /usr/bin/perl. (For more information on the test suite, please check out the appropriate section in the Developers' Guide.) Having done this, run the test itself:
perl runtests.pl 2 --verbose
to ensure that you've modified all the relevant files.
If using Apache on Windows, you can avoid the whole problem by setting the ScriptInterpreterSource directive to 'Registry'. (If using Apache 2 or higher, set it to 'Registry-Strict'.) ScriptInterperterSource requires a registry entry "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cgi\Shell\ExecCGI\Command" to associate .cgi files with your perl executable. If one does not already exist, create it with a default value of "<full path to perl> -T %*", e.g. "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe -T %*".
Make sure you close out the registry before trying it again. An export of the registry entry is: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cgi\Shell\ExecCGI\Command] @="c:\\perl\\bin\\perl.exe -T %*"
<Put that in a .reg file and import it into your registry>
Is there an easy way to change the Bugzilla cookie name?
At present, no.
Does bugzilla run under mod_perl?
Yes. You need to run Bugzilla 3.0 or newer. We recommend Bugzilla 3.0.3 or higher as significant improvements have been made in memory consumption.
How can Bugzilla be made to work under SELinux?
Unfortunately there are no step-by-step instructions, but the following URL contains hints on how to do it: http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-apache-fc3/sn-debugging-and-customizing.html
Managerial Questions
Is it possible to delete bug reports?
Yes. You have to turn on the 'allowbugdeletion' parameter, which is off by default. Note that you cannot delete bug reports one by one. You have to move them in a product or component, e.g. named "Trash", and then delete this product or component. The reason we make it hard is that you generally don't want to do that.
Is Bugzilla web-based, or do you have to have specific software or a specific operating system on your machine?
It is web and e-mail based.
Does Bugzilla allow us to define our own priorities and levels? Do we have complete freedom to change the labels of fields and format of them, and the choice of acceptable values?
Yes. You can edit the values of hardcoded fields but not their label. Since Bugzilla 3.0, you can even edit the list of valid resolutions and since Bugzilla 3.2, the list of legal bug statuses and transitions among them.
Moreover, Bugzilla 3.0 and newer allow you to add custom fields to Bugzilla from the UI. You can follow development of this feature in bug 91037
Does Bugzilla provide any reporting features, metrics, graphs, etc? You know, the type of stuff that management likes to see. :)
Yes. Look at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/report.cgi for samples of what Bugzilla can do in reporting and graphing. Fuller documentation is provided in Section 6.11.
If you can not get the reports you want from the included reporting scripts, it is possible to hook up a professional reporting package such as Crystal Reports using ODBC. If you choose to do this, beware that giving direct access to the database] does contain some security implications. Even if you give read-only access to the bugs database it will bypass the secure bugs features of Bugzilla.
Is there email notification? If so, what do you see when you get an email?
Email notification is user-configurable. By default, the bug id and summary of the bug report accompany each email notification, along with a list of the changes made.
Do users have to have any particular type of email application?
Bugzilla email is sent in plain text, the most compatible mail format on the planet.
- If you decide to use the bugzilla_email integration features to allow Bugzilla to record responses to mail with the associated bug, you may need to caution your users to set their mailer to "respond to messages in the format in which they were sent".
- For security reasons Bugzilla ignores HTML tags in comments, and if a user sends HTML-based email into Bugzilla the resulting comment looks downright awful.
Does Bugzilla allow data to be imported and exported? If I had outsiders write up a bug report using a MS Word bug template, could that template be imported into "matching" fields? If I wanted to take the results of a query and export that data to MS Excel, could I do that?
Bugzilla can output buglists as HTML (the default), CSV or RDF. The link for CSV can be found at the bottom of the buglist in HTML format. This CSV format can easily be imported into MS Excel or other spreadsheet applications.
To use the RDF format of the buglist it is necessary to append a &ctype=rdf to the URL. RDF is meant to be machine readable and thus it is assumed that the URL would be generated programmatically so there is no user visible link to this format.
Currently the only script included with Bugzilla that can import data is importxml.pl which is intended to be used for importing the data generated by the XML ctype of show_bug.cgi in association with bug moving. Any other use is left as an exercise for the user.
There are also scripts included in the contrib/ directory for using e-mail to import information into Bugzilla, but these scripts are not currently supported and included for educational purposes.
Has anyone converted Bugzilla to another language to be used in other countries? Is it localizable?
Yes, Bugzilla is fully localizable. For more information including available translated templates, see http://www.bugzilla.org/download.html#localizations. At this point, Bugzilla 3.0 is available in 8 different languages, and Bugzilla 3.2 in 5 languages.
Can a user create and save reports? Can they do this in Word format? Excel format?
Yes. No. Yes (using the CSV format).
Are there any backup features provided?
You should use the commands included with your database software to run the backups of your Bugzilla data. You can find strategies for dealing with backup considerations at http://www.mysql.com/doc/B/a/Backup.html for MySQL and at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/backup.html for PostgreSQL.
What type of human resources are needed to be on staff to install and maintain Bugzilla? Specifically, what type of skills does the person need to have? I need to find out what types of individuals would we need to hire and how much would that cost if we were to go with Bugzilla vs. buying an "out-of-the-box" solution.
If Bugzilla is set up correctly from the start, continuing maintenance needs are minimal and can be done easily using the web interface.
Commercial Bug-tracking software typically costs somewhere upwards of $20,000 or more for 5-10 floating licenses. Bugzilla consultation is available from skilled members of the newsgroup. Simple questions are answered there and then.
What time frame are we looking at if we decide to hire people to install and maintain the Bugzilla? Is this something that takes hours or days to install and a couple of hours per week to maintain and customize, or is this a multi-week install process, plus a full time job for 1 person, 2 people, etc?
It all depends on your level of commitment. Someone with much Bugzilla experience can get you up and running in less than a day, and your Bugzilla install can run untended for years. If your Bugzilla strategy is critical to your business workflow, hire somebody to who has reasonable Perl skills, and a familiarity with the operating system on which Bugzilla will be running, and have them handle your process management, bug-tracking maintenance, and local customization.
Is there any licensing fee or other fees for using Bugzilla? Any out-of-pocket cost other than the bodies needed as identified above?
No. Bugzilla, Perl, the Template Toolkit, and all other support software needed to make Bugzilla work can be downloaded for free. MySQL and PostgreSQL -- databases supported by Bugzilla -- are also open-source, but they ask that if you find their product valuable, you purchase a support contract from them that suits your needs.
We don't like referring to problems as 'bugs'. Can we change that?
Yes! As of Bugzilla 2.18, it is a simple matter to change the word 'bug' into whatever word/phrase is used by your organization. See the documentation on Customization for more details, specifically Section 5.1.5.
The Bugzilla FAQ