Peter's Blog

Using bugzilla now and disliking it the more I do so. Whinges:

• Generic reporting gives lowest common-denominator reports. Older versions (than 2.18.3) appear to have better reporting features.
• Nasty security system means that there is no anonymous access to reports. Why not? Had to hack report.cgi as follows:

  # pcw Bugzilla->login(LOGIN_REQUIRED);
  Bugzilla->login();
  

• Links to other pages at bottom of page, not side or top where they are useful. Ok I can hack templates to fix this but it's hastle.
• It would be nice to have whinge email running but the instructions are too cryptic for me to risk spamming everyone.

Out of desperation I tried version 2.20.0 but the differences in that didn't seem to be worth migrating for.

I've discovered the 'Alias' keyword in apache2 config files. This keyword allows a pretty free hand at redirecting urls to directories and files on the hard disk. Consider this extract from the site config file (in /etc/apache2/sites-available/intranet):

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName intranet
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

    DocumentRoot /var/www/intranet
    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/intranet>
        # pcw No directory listsings
        # Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    Alias /bugzilla "/var/www/bugzilla/"
    <Directory "/var/www/bugzilla/">
        Options ExecCGI -Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

This is telling apache that the site is called 'intranet' and is normally served up from the directory /var/www/intranet. However, there is a subdirectory called 'bugzilla' that is addressed as http://intranet/bugzilla but is served up from /var/www/bugzilla rather than /var/www/intranet/bugzilla.

Why would I want to do this? Because /var/www/intranet is a drupal setup stored in subversion and I don't want to put the bugzilla stuff in subversion or fiddle around telling subversion to ignore it. It keeps each feature of the domain cleanly seperated.

Installed Bugzilla as an issue tracking system for support work. I've looked at many Issue/ticket/bug tracking systems, mostly php/mysql based. Many of them were awkward to install, amateurish in execution or otherwise lacking. I won't name names (mainly because this was over a few months and I've forgotten most of the names). A close candidate was the drupal project module but I decided that was a bit too fiddly. Bugzilla is closer to what I want.

First tried bugzilla through an ubuntu package. Like a lot of packages this was an old version (2.16) where the latest is 2.18. The installation package put the bugzilla files in an awkward mix of directories and symbolic links. It didn't work very well and I could only get it to run through the url /cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi which was not very elegant. Then I had to poke around to find out how to customise it, working out where the package had put things.

When I installed my new server I decided to install the latest release version from the bugzilla site and this was very easy. It amounted to:

• untar the file
• move the contents to /var/www/bugzilla
• run the checksetup.pl script and fix the errors it threw up (mysql permissions, missing perl packages, not big problems).
• tweek apache to let /bugzilla run the appropriate index.cgi script.

Much nicer and more understandable installation than the package gave me, everything in one place.

I customised it by copying bugzilla/templates/en/default to bugzilla/templates/en/custom, editing the template files and running the checksetup.pl script again (which does some of the setup, it doesn't just check it).

With some tweeks to the templates and css I was able to:

• Change it to talk about 'issues' rather than 'bugs'.
• Change ugly black banner to navy blue.
• Change title from 'Bugzilla' to 'Issue Database'
• Change nasty huge serif font to subtle verdana.
• Change nasty picture of an Ant to something I found on a google image search for the word 'Complain' (which I am certain is not copyrighted).
• Remove the URL field from the bug entry form as it would never be required.

After this it was looking cool. Set up users (all user names are email addresses which is a bit naff), define projects and components and it's all ready to go.

Bugzilla is ok, it works, if I have any gripes they are:

• they could do with a good html designer on their team. The pages all look at bit slapdash.
• the emails it send out are not very clearly formatted
• why do I need to enter 'Priority' and a 'Severity'? Can I have a P5 priority (low?) and a critical severity?
• would be nice to have some user defined fields. I haven't looked into this but for our purposes it would be good to have a field for the person having the problem (don't want end users submitting bugs).