Mozilla, mostly known for its Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application, is into bugs, too. The company has announced version 3.0 of Bugzilla, one of the most widely used open source bug tracking
tools.
Version 3.0 marks the first full-version numbered upgrade
release since 1998, but that doesn’t mean the developers have been sitting on their hands.
“We were releasing major releases as 2.2, 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, etc.,” Max
Kanat-Alexander, Release Manager of the Bugzilla Project told
internetnews.com. “We decided to move to 3.0 for this release because
it contains several features that we’ve been generally working toward for
several years, including mod_perl support and custom fields.”
Among the new features in Bugzilla 3.0, according to Kanat-Alexander, include mod_perl extension support, which means Bugzilla page loads can
occur up to six times faster than before.
Custom fields support allows privileged users to add plain text or drop-down
custom fields in their Bugzilla installs in addition to the default fields
Bugzilla ships with.
A new shared saved search feature will allow Bugzilla users to save searches
and make them available to other users. Beyond shared searches Bugzilla 3.0 is going to be even more open because of new Web Services, which is now built into Bugzilla thanks to an XML-RPC (remote procedure call) interface.
Kanat-Alexander also noted that there are a lot of usability improvements in
various areas making Bugzilla 3.0 easier to use. Though Mozilla is a user of
Bugzilla it isn’t the only one. Bugzilla is likely now the de facto
standard bug-tracking system in use by a majority of open source efforts.
Upgrading from now legacy versions to version 3.0 is a trivial task.
According to Kanat-Alexander you basically just download the new version and
run a script.
Though 3.0 is a major release for Bugzilla, it remains a work in progress.
“Right now we’re planning to call the next version 3.2,” Kanat-Alexander
said. “[Version 3.2] will still be a major version release, though. It’ll have
significant new features, and all that, just like all our major releases
have.”
Whether it’ll be another nine years before Bugzilla hits version 4.0 is unknown. “If we make some really major strides toward some huge changes, there will
probably be a 4.0 at that point.”
