Bugzilla

Bugzilla is an open source web-based "Defect Tracking System" or "Bug-Tracking System" that allows individual developers or groups of developers to effectively keep track of outstanding bugs in their applications.

With Bugzilla installed on your infrastructure, you will definitely increase productivity, improve communication between all sectors, ensure accountability, increase product quality, as well as to improve customer satisfaction. Above all, it is capable of adapting to any situation.

Features at a glance

Key features include generic reporting, request system, enterprise group support, user wildcard matching, insiders, time tracking, multiple authentication methods, localization, patch viewer, comment reply links, full-text search, as well as email address munging.

Additionally, the software comes with support for generic charting, and sanity check support. Many open source projects use the Bugzilla software for tracking bugs and issues for their product(s), including Mozilla, GNOME, Red Hat, Gentoo, etc.

Its database structure has been highly optimized for increased scalability and performance. Security is yet another strong point of Bugzilla, helping users to protect their confidentiality. Another interesting features is the built-in email integration functionality.

Among other interesting features, we can mention an enhanced permissions system, support for creating advanced queries that remember your searches, all-inclusive email preferences, as well as editable user profiles.

Supported web browsers and operating systems

Bugzilla is independent of a computer operating systems, or any OS for that matter, as it can be access from virtually any platform, mobile or PC, through a supported web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Safari, Midori, Epiphany, etc).

Currently, the project has been successfully tested under GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems, supporting both 64-bit and 32-bit instruction set architectures.

What is new in this release:

• Improved WebServices
• Improved Caching using Memcached
• Abililty to Tag Bug Comments
• Improved Bug Group Membership Checking
• Improved Documentation for Users and Administrators
• Other Enhancements and Changes

What is new in version 4.5.6 / 5.0 RC3:

• checksetup.pl was incorrectly reporting DBI 1.630 (1.63) as being older than 1.614, preventing the upgrade to complete. If you still use Perl 5.10.0 or older, make sure you have the version module installed before running checksetup.pl. If you use Perl 5.10.1 or newer, this module is already available and no special action is required. (Bug 938300)
• An error about longdescs.comment_id was thrown by MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 when upgrading to Bugzilla 4.4 or 4.4.1. (Bug 870369)
• Saved searches containing Unicode characters in their name could not be run if Digest::SHA 5.82 or newer is installed. (Bug 964113)
• A regression in Bugzilla 4.4.1 caused email_in.pl to fail with an "invalid token" error message. (Bug 928331 and bug 930013)
• The PROJECT environment variable is now correctly taken into account when mod_perl is enabled (this variable allows several installations to share the same codebase). (Bug 843457)
• Mandatory custom fields whose visibility depends on a component are now correctly required on bug creation. (Bug 895813)
• Windows 8.1 is now recognized when reporting new bugs. (Bug 928092)
• Bugzilla no longer crashes when the shutdownhtml parameter is set and using a non-cookie based authentication method. (Bug 748095)
• importxml.pl no longer ignores the maxattachmentsize and maxlocalattachment parameters when importing bugs. This means that large attachments are now stored locally in data/attachments/ if parameters are configured this way. The script must now be run as the webserver user (e.g. apache) to make these attachments readable from web browsers. (Bug 360231)
• The default date and time format used for SQLite has been fixed. (Bug 938161)

What is new in version 4.5.6 / 5.0 RC2:

• checksetup.pl was incorrectly reporting DBI 1.630 (1.63) as being older than 1.614, preventing the upgrade to complete. If you still use Perl 5.10.0 or older, make sure you have the version module installed before running checksetup.pl. If you use Perl 5.10.1 or newer, this module is already available and no special action is required. (Bug 938300)
• An error about longdescs.comment_id was thrown by MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 when upgrading to Bugzilla 4.4 or 4.4.1. (Bug 870369)
• Saved searches containing Unicode characters in their name could not be run if Digest::SHA 5.82 or newer is installed. (Bug 964113)
• A regression in Bugzilla 4.4.1 caused email_in.pl to fail with an "invalid token" error message. (Bug 928331 and bug 930013)
• The PROJECT environment variable is now correctly taken into account when mod_perl is enabled (this variable allows several installations to share the same codebase). (Bug 843457)
• Mandatory custom fields whose visibility depends on a component are now correctly required on bug creation. (Bug 895813)
• Windows 8.1 is now recognized when reporting new bugs. (Bug 928092)
• Bugzilla no longer crashes when the shutdownhtml parameter is set and using a non-cookie based authentication method. (Bug 748095)
• importxml.pl no longer ignores the maxattachmentsize and maxlocalattachment parameters when importing bugs. This means that large attachments are now stored locally in data/attachments/ if parameters are configured this way. The script must now be run as the webserver user (e.g. apache) to make these attachments readable from web browsers. (Bug 360231)
• The default date and time format used for SQLite has been fixed. (Bug 938161)

What is new in version 4.0.11:

• Bugzilla can now be installed with MySQL 5.6 as DB server. (Bug 852560)
• Internet Explorer 11 can now display buglists correctly. (Bug 902515)
• With DB servers doing case-insensitive comparisons, such as MySQL, tokens and login cookies were not correctly validated as the case was ignored. (Bug 906745 and bug 907438)
• All security headers (such as X-Frame-Options) are now returned when using XML-RPC. (Bug 787328)

What is new in version 4.2.7:

• Internet Explorer 11 and KHTML-based browsers such as Konqueror can now display buglists correctly. (Bug 902515 and bug 914262)
• When the password_complexity parameter was set to 'letters_numbers_specialchars', passwords containing numbers and special characters only were accepted. Now it makes sure that a letter is also present. (Bug 897264)
• With DB servers doing case-insensitive comparisons, such as MySQL, tokens and login cookies were not correctly validated as the case was ignored. (Bug 906745 and bug 907438)
• All security headers (such as X-Frame-Options) are now returned when using XML-RPC. (Bug 787328)
• Oracle crashed when reporting a new bug if a custom free-text field was non-mandatory and left empty. (Bug 919475)
• It was not possible to import bugs using importxml.pl with Oracle. (Bug 848063)

What is new in version 4.4.1:

• checksetup.pl no longer fails with "Invalid version format (non-numeric data)" when a Perl module contains an invalid version number. (Bug 781672)
• Internet Explorer 11 and KHTML-based browsers such as Konqueror can now display buglists correctly. (Bug 902515 and bug 914262)
• When editing several bugs at once and moving them into a new product, bugs restricted to a group in the old product could loose these group restrictions in the new product. (Bug 769134)
• When the password_complexity parameter was set to 'letters_numbers_specialchars', passwords containing numbers and special characters only were accepted. Now it makes sure that a letter is also present. (Bug 897264)
• Large dependency trees are now displayed much faster. (Bug 917370)
• When a user has set many votes, the "Votes" page is now displayed much faster. (Bug 851267)
• The "My Requests" page now correctly uses the AND/OR operator for the requester and requestee fields only instead of using it for all fields. (Bug 891311)
• With DB servers doing case-insensitive comparisons, such as MySQL, tokens and login cookies were not correctly validated as the case was ignored. (Bug 906745 and bug 907438)
• All security headers (such as X-Frame-Options) are now returned when using XML-RPC. (Bug 787328)
• Oracle crashed when reporting a new bug if a custom free-text field was non-mandatory and left empty. (Bug 919475)
• It was not possible to import bugs using importxml.pl with Oracle. (Bug 848063)

What is new in version 4.0:

• A fully-redesigned Advanced Search page
• Automatic duplicate detection when filing bugs
• Drop-down autocomplete for every field that accepts a user name or email address
• Full control and retrieval of bugs via the WebService, including updating existing bugs
• Redesigned home page icons from J. Pink Design
• Numerous usability improvements
• and much, much more...

What is new in version 3.4.6:

• When doing a search that involves "not equals" or "does not contain the string" or similar "negative" search types, the search description that appears at the top of the resulting bug list will indicate that the search was of that type. (Bug 474738)
• In Internet Explorer, users couldn't easily mark a RESOLVED DUPLICATE bug as REOPENED, due to a JavaScript error. (Bug 546719)
• If you use a "bookmarkable template" to pre-fill forms on the bug-filing page, and you have custom fields that are only supposed to appear (or only supposed to have certain values) based on the values of other fields, those custom fields will now work properly. (Bug 538211)
• If you have a custom field that's only supposed to appear when a bug's resolution is FIXED, it will now behave properly on the bug-editing form when a user sets the bug's status to RESOLVED. (Bug 520993)
• If you are logged-out and using request.cgi, the Requester and Requestee fields no longer respect the usermatching parameter--they always require full usernames. (Bug 533018)
• If you tried to do a search with too many terms (resulting in a URL that was longer than about 7000 characters), Apache would return a 500 error instead of your search results. (Bug 513989)
• Bugzilla would sometimes lose fields from your sort order when you added new fields to your sort order. (Bug 470214)
• The Atom format of search results would sometimes be missing the Reporter or Assignee field for some bugs. (Bug 537834)

What is new in version 3.6 RC1:

• General Usability Improvements
• New Extensions System
• Improved Quicksearch
• Simple "Browse" Interface
• SUExec Support
• Experimental mod_perl Support on Windows
• Send Attachments by Email
• JSON-RPC Interface
• Migration From Other Bug-Trackers

What is new in version 3.4.3:

• Bugzilla installations running under mod_perl were leaking about 512K of RAM per page load. (Bug 517793)
• Attachments with Unicode characters in their names were being downloaded with mangled names. (Bug 328628)
• Creating custom fields with Unicode in their database column name is now no longer allowed, as it would break Bugzilla. If you created such a custom field, you should delete it by first marking it obsolete and then clicking "Delete" in the custom field list, using editfields.cgi. (Bug 525025)
• Clicking "submit only my comment" on the "mid-air collisions" page was leading to a "Suspicious Action" warning. (Bug 514378)
• The XML format of a bug accidentally contained the word-wrapped content of comments instead of the unwrapped content. (Bug 509152)
• You can now do ./install-module.pl --shell to get a CPAN shell using the configuration of install-module.pl, which allows you to do more advanced Perl module installation tasks. (Bug 445875)

What is new in version 3.4:

• A greatly-simplified bug-filing page.
• A new front page for Bugzilla.
• Users' email addresses are now hidden from logged-out users (helps prevent users receiving spam)
• Emails can be sent in the background (which greatly speeds up editing bugs)
• URLs of searches are now much shorter, so they can be more easily shared.
• Exciting new custom field enhancements
• A field that allows you to refer to bugs in other Bugzillas.

What is new in version 3.2.2:

• This release contains various useful bugfixes in addition to major security improvements.

What is new in version 3.3.3:

• This release contains major security improvements over 3.3.1, and also contains numerous new features and improvements. Note that it is very unstable and should not be used in a production environment.

What is new in version 3.3.1:

• Users can choose their time zone.
• The "Bug ID" custom field type was added.
• Values and visibility of custom fields can now be controlled by other fields.
• Bug lists show a description of what you searched for at the top of the list.
• Many other features were added.
• This is an unstable release; it should only be used in testing environments.

What is new in version 3.2:

• An enormous number of features were added, including some user interface enhancements, custom statuses, new custom field types, Oracle support, and lots of other improvements.

What is new in version 3.2 RC2:

• There have been a lot of changes since 3.2rc1, particularly in the UI.
• This version is stable enough to use in small production environments, but major installations should wait for 3.2 final before upgrading.

What is new in version 3.0.6:

• Some bugs were fixed and a security fix was made.

Requirements:

• MySQL Community Edition