What is Bugzilla?

The Bugzilla Guide - 2.16.6 Release
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# 2.1. What is Bugzilla?

Bugzilla is a bug- or issue-tracking system. Bug-tracking systems allow individual or groups of developers effectively to keep track of outstanding problems with their product. Bugzilla was originally written by Terry Weissman in a programming language called TCL, to replace a rudimentary bug-tracking database used internally by Netscape Communications. Terry later ported Bugzilla to Perl from TCL, and in Perl it remains to this day. Most commercial defect-tracking software vendors at the time charged enormous licensing fees, and Bugzilla quickly became a favorite of the open-source crowd (with its genesis in the open-source browser project, Mozilla). It is now the de-facto standard defect-tracking system against which all others are measured.

Bugzilla boasts many advanced features. These include:

- Powerful searching

- User-configurable email notifications of bug changes

- Full change history

- Inter-bug dependency tracking and graphing

- Excellent attachment management

- Integrated, product-based, granular security schema

- Fully security-audited, and runs under Perl's taint mode

- A robust, stable RDBMS back-end

- Web, XML, email and console interfaces

- Completely customisable and/or localisable web user interface

- Extensive configurability

- Smooth upgrade pathway between versions

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