Firefox gets all the glory, but the Mozilla Project does more than supply the world with a free, fast and flexible browser. Mozilla also provides Bugzilla, a bug tracking system used by hundreds of open source projects and countless organizations and companies working with software. Last week, to little fanfare, Bugzilla 3.6 was released with major usability updates and a new extension system.
Bugzilla deserves props for enabling so many free software projects, but the ubiquitous bug tracking system has not been without its flaws. Namely, Bugzilla is known for being difficult to navigate and use, particularly for new contributors who have little experience working with bug ticketing systems. The 3.6 release sands off some of the rough edges following a usability study from Carnegie Mellon University. The list of bugs stemming from the research are not all closed, but the project has made significant progress.
This release also debuts an Extensions system so that projects can extend or modify Bugzilla without having to touch the core code. This has been a problem for Bugzilla in the past, when projects would implement new features in their own instance of Bugzilla and then have problems upgrading to newer releases. Extensions are written in Perl, and the project has a lengthy set of docs on how to create a new extension.
Another nice feature in 3.6 is support for SUExec, so that Bugzilla can be run more easily in shared hosting environments. Just browsing? The 3.6 release has a simpler interface for users to browse through open bugs without diving deep into the regular Bugzilla interface.
For a full list of improvements and changes, and there are quite a few, see the release notes.
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