What is Bugzilla?
Bugzilla is a bug- or issue-tracking system. Bug-tracking systems allow individual or groups of developers effectively to keep track of outstanding problems with their product. Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called TCL, to replace a rudimentary bug-tracking database used internally by Netscape Communications. Terry later ported Bugzilla to Perl from TCL, and in Perl it remains to this day. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the time charged enormous licensing fees, and Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It is now the de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are measured. Bugzilla boasts many advanced features.
For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Bugzilla. Bugzilla is an on-line bug-tracking tool, developed by the Mozilla Foundation, and is the system we use to track all open issues with MediaWiki. The reason we use Bugzilla is that it allows the developers to easily find, track and discuss issues, to spot duplicates and ultimately to resolve them. The Wikimedia Bugzilla site is sometimes referred as Mediazilla.
Bugzilla is a database for bugs. It lets people report bugs and assigns these bugs to the appropriate developers. Developers can use Bugzilla to keep a to-do list as well as to prioritize, schedule and track dependencies. Not all ‘bugs’ are bugs. Some items in the database are known as Enhancement Requests or Requests For Enhancement (RFE). An RFE is a bug whose severity field is set to ‘enhancement’. People often say ‘bug’ when they mean ‘item in Bugzilla’, so RFEs often wind up being called bugs. Enter the tasks you’re planning to work on as enhancement requests and Bugzilla will help you track them and allow others to see what you plan to work on. If people can see your flight plan, they can avoid duplicating your work and can possibly help out or offer feedback. Looking for the source of Bugzilla? If you want to set up a Bugzilla on your own server, you can get it here.
Bugzilla is a database of bugs and feature requests developed by the [Mozilla] project. It helps developers keep track of what’s broken and who’s fixing it. Users can help by making bug reports clear and specific. The better your bug report, the easier it is to identify the cause, and fix the bug.
