Bugzilla 4.0 Released!

So, last week we released Bugzilla 4.0, which was pretty exciting. It had some awesome major new features, like the redesigned search page, automatic duplicate detection, autocomplete for user and keyword fields, and an enormously-enhanced WebServices interface.

In addition to all of these huge features, though, there were a lot of smaller improvements that were pretty awesome in and of themselves. The major, major features are so huge that it’s easy to miss how great some of the other changes were, so I wanted to take some time in this blog to talk about some of those “smaller” improvements that can be pretty significant for some users.

UI Improvements

In addition to the redesigned search page, one of the biggest UI improvements is the new “attachment details” page (log in to see the full functionality). If you do a lot of code review in your Bugzilla, or if you open up attachments frequently to comment on them, you’ll appreciate the new full-size comment box and the enormous textarea space available for commenting inline on text attachments.

Also, another really nice change is that when you forget to set a required field on bug entry, you’re notified before you leave the page, instead of having to submit the form and then go back to add any missing data. Bugzilla highlights the fields you missed and puts a clear message in bold red letters on the page so that you can see what you need to fill out. It even puts the page focus on the first box you need to fix, now.

On the Search page and the bug entry page, you can hover over the label of any field to get a description of what that field does. Your mouse cursor will even change to indicate the availability of help. This should be particularly useful to people who are new to Bugzilla.

When you do a “quicksearch” using the box in the header or footer, your search will still be there when you see the search results, now. This makes editing the search you just did a lot easier.

There is a “Calendar” widget for every single date/time field in Bugzilla now.

You can choose to have the “Add a new comment” box above or below the existing comments, when viewing a bug, now. (See your Preferences.)

Every command-line script of Bugzilla now prints any error in red (if this is possible in your terminal), to make it really clear that running the script did not succeed.

And of course, this is pretty obvious, but there are great new icons for the Home page, now.

Custom Fields

People have long asked for the ability to make certain custom fields “mandatory”–that is, when filing a bug, you have to fill those fields out, and after the bug is filed, those fields can never be empty. Bugzilla 4.0 now supports this–all you have to do is check a single checkbox in the Administration UI, and your custom field becomes mandatory!

You can see “Multi-Select” custom fields as a column in your search results (the bug list) now!

Almost every custom field in your system will now be available as an axis for Graphical Reports and Tabular Reports. (Actually, a whole lot of other built-in fields are now available, too!)

You can now represent relationships between bugs when using the “Bug ID” field.

You can now display custom fields only in a certain Component or only in a certain Classification.

Search

Some people make really heavy use of the “Show my last search results” link, or the “First/Previous/Next/Last” links at the top of the bug page. In past versions of Bugzilla, doing a new search would entirely replace your “last search results”, meaning that “Show my last search results” and the “First/Previous/Next/Last” links would suddenly be working with a whole new set of bugs. Now Bugzilla “remembers” the last five search results for all logged-in users and does its best to give you the right list whenever you’re trying to navigate using those links on the bug page.

You can now search for attachments with specific flags on them, when using the Boolean Charts (which are now called “Custom Search”). Just specify a criteron for an attachment and a criterion for a flag in the same Chart.

Since almost the very first version of Bugzilla, you haven’t been able to search for a Product, Component, Target Milestone, etc. if its name contained a comma. Now you can!

WebServices

You can get data from the Bugzilla JSON-RPC WebService using HTTP GET, now, which is a lot easier in many situations. Also, you can even call the JSON-RPC WebServices from another domain using JSONP, meaning that you can use data from an external Bugzilla on your webpage, straight from JavaScript!

Also, there are a ton of new WebService functions and parameters available. See the full list of WebService improvements for details. Probably the biggest one is the new Bug.update function that allows you to update existing bugs.

Miscellaneous

Loading pages in Bugzilla should now be much faster, particularly if it’s your first time visiting Bugzilla, since we have eliminated the need for the browser to download a large number of unnecessary CSS files.

If you’re using time-tracking, you don’t have to enter a comment just to enter Hours Worked anymore!

If you’re setting up the Inbound Email interface, you can set defaults for certain fields using command-line switches.

If you are using a localized version of Bugzilla and your terminal does not understand Unicode, all of Bugzilla’s command-line scripts will now attempt to output their messages in your terminal’s character set.

If you are running Bugzilla under suexec (usually meaning that you’re on shared hosting), checksetup.pl now properly sets permissions on everything, meaning that all functionality of Bugzilla should now be working (including graphs and dependency trees).

Bugzilla now optionally supports sending the Strict-Transport-Security HTTP header for improved security on HTTPS installations.

If you are writing extensions, there are a ton of new hooks. The Extensions system is now capable of implementing the vast majority of possible extensions, particularly if you know a few tricks.

Future Plans

Now that 4.0 is released, we’re working on 4.2! Actually, we’ve been working on 4.2 for quite some time, and it already has some great new features, such as HTML bugmail and a new “tags” system that we’re implementing. We also expect to have a fully-redesigned Search backend that behaves consistently and intelligently for all searches while also performing considerably better than the current system does. There are already 100 enhancements marked as FIXED for 4.2, in fact! Check out that full list for details.

Currently our plan is to freeze for 4.2 on April 20, which would put our likely release date at some point in Q4 of 2011. Of course, depending on how many contributors we get, we could possibly release even earlier than that! Finding and fixing bugs in the trunk code is the fastest way to speed up our release process, so if you want to do that, see our development process for information on how to get our code and submit patches!

-Max

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