1. About This Guide — Bugzilla 4.5.4 documentation

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# 1. About This Guide

## 1.1. Introduction

This is the documentation for version 4.5 of Bugzilla, a bug-tracking system from mozilla.org. Bugzilla is an enterprise-class piece of software that tracks millions of bugs and issues for hundreds of organizations around the world.

The most current version of this document can always be found on the Bugzilla Documentation Page.

## 1.2. Copyright Information

This document is copyright (c) 2000-2014 by the various Bugzilla contributors who wrote it.

> Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in GNU Free Documentation License.

If you have any questions regarding this document, its copyright, or publishing this document in non-electronic form, please contact the Bugzilla Team.

## 1.3. Disclaimer

No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted. Follow the instructions herein at your own risk. This document may contain errors and inaccuracies that may damage your system, cause your partner to leave you, your boss to fire you, your cats to pee on your furniture and clothing, and global thermonuclear war. Proceed with caution.

Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements, with the exception of the term "GNU/Linux". We wholeheartedly endorse the use of GNU/Linux; it is an extremely versatile, stable, and robust operating system that offers an ideal operating environment for Bugzilla.

Although the Bugzilla development team has taken great care to ensure that all exploitable bugs have been fixed, security holes surely exist in any piece of code. Great care should be taken both in the installation and usage of this software. The Bugzilla development team members assume no liability for your use of Bugzilla. You have the source code, and are responsible for auditing it yourself to ensure your security needs are met.

## 1.4. New Versions

This is version 4.5 of The Bugzilla Guide. It is so named to match the current version of Bugzilla.

The latest version of this guide can always be found at http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/. However, you should read the version which came with the Bugzilla release you are using.

In addition, there are Bugzilla template localization projects in several languages. They may have translated documentation available. If you would like to volunteer to translate the Guide into additional languages, please visit the Bugzilla L10n team page.

## 1.5. Credits

The people listed below have made enormous contributions to the creation of this Guide, through their writing, dedicated hacking efforts, numerous e-mail and IRC support sessions, and overall excellent contribution to the Bugzilla community:

Matthew P. Barnson mbarnson@sisna.com
  for the Herculean task of pulling together the Bugzilla Guide and shepherding it to 2.14.
Terry Weissman terry@mozilla.org
  for initially writing Bugzilla and creating the README upon which the UNIX installation documentation is largely based.
Tara Hernandez tara@tequilarists.org
  for keeping Bugzilla development going strong after Terry left mozilla.org and for running landfill.
Dave Lawrence dkl@redhat.com
  for providing insight into the key differences between Red Hat's customized Bugzilla.
Dawn Endico endico@mozilla.org
  for being a hacker extraordinaire and putting up with Matthew's incessant questions and arguments on irc.mozilla.org in #mozwebtools
Jacob Steenhagen jake@bugzilla.org
  for taking over documentation during the 2.17 development period.
Dave Miller justdave@bugzilla.org
  for taking over as project lead when Tara stepped down and continually pushing for the documentation to be the best it can be.

Thanks also go to the following people for significant contributions to this documentation: Kevin Brannen, Vlad Dascalu, Ben FrantzDale, Eric Hanson, Zach Lipton, Gervase Markham, Andrew Pearson, Joe Robins, Spencer Smith, Ron Teitelbaum, Shane Travis, Martin Wulffeld.

Also, thanks are due to the members of the mozilla.support.bugzilla newsgroup (and its predecessor, netscape.public.mozilla.webtools). Without your discussions, insight, suggestions, and patches, this could never have happened.

## 1.6. Document Conventions

This document uses the following conventions:

Warning

This is a warning - something you should be aware of.

Note

This is just a note, for your information.

A filename or a path to a filename is displayed like this: `/path/to/filename.ext`

A command to type in the shell is displayed like this: command --arguments

bash$ represents a normal user's prompt under bash shell

bash# represents a root user's prompt under bash shell

A sample of code is illustrated like this:

    First Line of Code
    Second Line of Code
    ...

This documentation is maintained in reStructured Text format. Changes are best submitted as diffs, attached to a bug filed in the Bugzilla Documentation component.

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