What's
New with Bugzilla 2.18 ?
***********
Generic Reporting
-----------------
Bugzilla has a new
mechanism for generating reports of the current state of the
bug database. It has two related parts: a table-based view,
and several graphical views.
The table-based
view allows you to specify an x, y and z (multiple tables of
data) axis to plot, and then restrict the bugs plotted using
the standard query form. You can view the resulting data as
an HTML or CSV export (e.g.:
for importing into a spreadsheet).
There are also bar,
line and pie charts, which are defined in a very similar way.
These views may be more appropriate for particular data types,
and are suitable for saving and then putting into presentations
or web pages.
Request System
---------------
The Request System
(RS) is a set of enhancements that adds powerful flag (superset
of the old attachment status) features to the bugs.
RS allows for four
states: off, granted, denied, and (optionally) requested, where
"granted" is the equivalent of "on". These
additions mean it is no longer necessary to define a status
to negate another status (e.g. "needs-work" to negate
"has-review") because negation is built into each
status via the status' "denied" state. Bug statuses:
Previously only attachments could have these kinds of statuses.
RS enables them for bugs as well. This feature can be used to
request and grant/deny certain properties for a bug, such as
inclusion for a specific milestone or approval for checkin.
This way, Bugzilla supports the natural decision-making process
in your organization.
- Requests:
Flags can now optionally be made requestable, which means users
can ask other users to set them. When a user requests a flag,
Bugzilla emails the requestee and adds the request to a browsable
queue so both the requester and the requestee can keep track
of its status. Once the requestee fulfills the request by setting
the flag to either granted or denied, Bugzilla emails the requestee
and removes the request from the queue. This feature supports
workflow like the mozilla.org code review and milestone approval
processes, whereby code is peer reviewed before being committed
and patches get approved by product release managers for inclusion
in specific product releases.
- Product/component
specificity: Previously flags were product-specific,
and if you wanted the same flag for multiple products you had
to define multiple flags with the same name. Flags are now product/component-specific,
and a single flag can be enabled or disabled for multiple product/component
combinations via inclusions and exclusions lists. Flags are
enabled for all combinations on their inclusions list except
those that appear on their exclusions list.
Enterprise Group Support
------------------------
Bugzilla is no longer
limited to 55 access control groups. Administrators can define
an arbitrary number of access groups composed of individual
users or other groups. The groups can be configured via the
web interface to achieve a wide variety of access control policies.
See the documentation section on 'Groups And Group Controls'
for details.
User Wildcard Matching
----------------------
Sites can now enable
the use of wildcards and substrings in bug entry and editing
forms. If the user enters an incomplete username, he'll get
a list of users that matched the given username.
Support for "Insiders"
----------------------
If the 'insidergroup'
parameter is defined, a specific group of users can be designated
insiders who can designate comments and attachments as private
to other insiders. These comments and attachments will be invisible
to other users who are not members of the insiders group even
if the bugs to which they apply are visible. Other insiders
will see the comments and attachments with a visual tinting
indicating that they are private.
Time Tracking
-------------
Controls for tracking
time spent fixing bugs are included in the bug form for members
of the group specified by the 'timetrackinggroup' parameter.
Any time comments are added to the bug, members of the time
tracking group can add an amount of time they spent, and it's
figured into the total and displayed at the top of the bug.
Shown in the bug are your original estimate, the amount of time
spent so far, the revised estimate of how much time is remaining,
and your gain/loss on the original estimate.
Authentication module/LDAP improvements
---------------------------------------
Bugzilla's authentication
mechanisms have been modularized, making pluggable authentication
schemes for Bugzilla a reality. Both the existing database and
LDAP systems were ported as part of modularization process.
Additionally, the CGI portion of the backend was redesigned
to allow for authentication from other sources, including (theoretically)
email, which will help Bug 94850.
As part of this
conversion, LDAP logins now use Perl's standard Net::LDAP module,
which has no external library dependencies.
Improved localization support
-----------------------------
Bugzilla administrators
can now configure which languages are supported by their installations
and automatically serve correct, localized content to users
based on the HTTP 'Accept-Language' header sent from users'
browsers.
There are currently
localized templates available for: Arabic, Belarusian, Chinese,
French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil) Spanish
(Spain or Mexico) and Russian. These localized template packs
are third-party
contributions, may only be available for specific versions,
and may not be supported in the future. (http://www.bugzilla.org/download/#localizations)
Patch Viewer
------------
Viewing and reviewing
patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to lack of context,
improper format and the inherent readability issues that raw
patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla
designed to fix that by
offering increased context, linking to sections, and integrating
with Bonsai, LXR and CVS.
Comment Reply Links
-------------------
In Edit Bug, each
bug comment now includes a convenient (reply) link that
quotes the comment text into the textarea. This feature is only
enabled in
Javascript-capable browsers, but causes no inconvenience to
other user agents.
Full-Text Search
----------------
It is now possible
to query the Bugzilla database using full-text searching, which
spans comments and summaries, and which searches for substrings
and stem variations of the search term. Basically, it's like
using Google.
Email Address Munging
---------------------
The fact that raw
email addresses are displayed in Bugzilla makes it trivial for
bots that spamharvest to spider through Bugzilla, in particular,
through Bugzilla's buglists. This change adds HTML obfuscation
of email addresses as they appear in the Bugzilla web pages.
Generic Charting
----------------
Bugzilla's new charting
feature allows you to display flexible summary charts, based
on configurable data sets (bug 16009).
Miscellaneous Improvements
--------------------------
- The "Assigned
To" field on the new bug page is now prefilled with the
default component owner.
- A bug alias column
is now available in the buglist page.
- Lists of bugs
containing errors in the sanity check page now have a "view
as buglist" link in addition to the individual bug links.
- Autolinkification
Page - It's now possible to apply Bugzilla's comment hyperlinking
algorithm to any text you like. This should be useful for status
updates and other web pages which give lists of bugs. The bug
links created
include the subject, status and resolution of the bug as a tooltip.
- There are more
<link> tags on the links toolbar for navigating quickly
between different areas.
- Buglists are now
available as comma-separated value files (CSV) and JavaScript
(JS) as well as HTML and RDF.
- Keywords and dependencies
can now be entered during initial bug entry.
- A CSS id signature
unique to each Bugzilla installation is now added to the <body>
tag on Bugzilla pages to allow custom end-user CSS to explicitly
affect Bugzilla.
- Perl's path has
been changed to a normal /usr/bin/perl from the original legacy
"bonsaitools" path specifier.
- A new "always-require-login"
parameter allows administrators to require a login before being
able to view any page, except the front page.
- A developer may
add an attachment, and also reassign a bug to himself as part
of that single action.
- Bugzilla is now
able to use the replication facilities provided by the MySQL
database to handle updates from the main database to the secondaries.
- Mail handling
is now between 125% to 175% faster.
