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<chapter id="using">
<title>Using Bugzilla</title>
<section id="using-intro">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>This section contains information for end-users of Bugzilla. There
is a Bugzilla test installation, called
<ulink url="http://landfill.bugzilla.org/">Landfill</ulink>, which you are
welcome to play with (if it's up). However, not all of the Bugzilla
installations there will necessarily have all Bugzilla features enabled,
and different installations run different versions, so some things may not
quite work as this document describes.</para>
</section>
<section id="myaccount">
<title>Create a Bugzilla Account</title>
<para>If you want to use Bugzilla, first you need to create an account.
Consult with the administrator responsible for your installation of
Bugzilla for the URL you should use to access it. If you're
test-driving Bugzilla, use this URL:
<ulink url="&landfillbase;"/>.
</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Click the
<quote>Open a new Bugzilla account</quote>
link, enter your email address and, optionally, your name in the
spaces provided, then click
<quote>Create Account</quote>
.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Within moments, you should receive an email to the address
you provided, which contains your login name (generally the
same as the email address), and a password.
This password is randomly generated, but can be
changed to something more memorable.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Click the
<quote>Log In</quote>
link in the footer at the bottom of the page in your browser,
enter your email address and password into the spaces provided, and
click
<quote>Login</quote>.
</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
<para>You are now logged in. Bugzilla uses cookies to remember you are
logged in so, unless you have cookies disabled or your IP address changes,
you should not have to log in again.</para>
</section>
<section id="bug_page">
<title>Anatomy of a Bug</title>
<para>The core of Bugzilla is the screen which displays a particular
bug. It's a good place to explain some Bugzilla concepts.
<ulink
url="&landfillbase;show_bug.cgi?id=1">
Bug 1 on Landfill</ulink>
is a good example. Note that the labels for most fields are hyperlinks;
clicking them will take you to context-sensitive help on that
particular field. Fields marked * may not be present on every
installation of Bugzilla.</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Product and Component</emphasis>:
Bugs are divided up by Product and Component, with a Product
having one or more Components in it. For example,
bugzilla.mozilla.org's "Bugzilla" Product is composed of several
Components:
<simplelist>
<member>
<emphasis>Administration:</emphasis>
Administration of a Bugzilla installation.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Bugzilla-General:</emphasis>
Anything that doesn't fit in the other components, or spans
multiple components.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Creating/Changing Bugs:</emphasis>
Creating, changing, and viewing bugs.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Documentation:</emphasis>
The Bugzilla documentation, including The Bugzilla Guide.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Email:</emphasis>
Anything to do with email sent by Bugzilla.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Installation:</emphasis>
The installation process of Bugzilla.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Query/Buglist:</emphasis>
Anything to do with searching for bugs and viewing the
buglists.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Reporting/Charting:</emphasis>
Getting reports from Bugzilla.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>User Accounts:</emphasis>
Anything about managing a user account from the user's perspective.
Saved queries, creating accounts, changing passwords, logging in,
etc.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>User Interface:</emphasis>
General issues having to do with the user interface cosmetics (not
functionality) including cosmetic issues, HTML templates,
etc.</member>
</simplelist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Status and Resolution:</emphasis>
These define exactly what state the bug is in - from not even
being confirmed as a bug, through to being fixed and the fix
confirmed by Quality Assurance. The different possible values for
Status and Resolution on your installation should be documented in the
context-sensitive help for those items.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Assigned To:</emphasis>
The person responsible for fixing the bug.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*URL:</emphasis>
A URL associated with the bug, if any.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Summary:</emphasis>
A one-sentence summary of the problem.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*Status Whiteboard:</emphasis>
(a.k.a. Whiteboard) A free-form text area for adding short notes
and tags to a bug.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*Keywords:</emphasis>
The administrator can define keywords which you can use to tag and
categorise bugs - e.g. The Mozilla Project has keywords like crash
and regression.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Platform and OS:</emphasis>
These indicate the computing environment where the bug was
found.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Version:</emphasis>
The "Version" field is usually used for versions of a product which
have been released, and is set to indicate which versions of a
Component have the particular problem the bug report is
about.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Priority:</emphasis>
The bug assignee uses this field to prioritise his or her bugs.
It's a good idea not to change this on other people's bugs.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Severity:</emphasis>
This indicates how severe the problem is - from blocker
("application unusable") to trivial ("minor cosmetic issue"). You
can also use this field to indicate whether a bug is an enhancement
request.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*Target:</emphasis>
(a.k.a. Target Milestone) A future version by which the bug is to
be fixed. e.g. The Bugzilla Project's milestones for future
Bugzilla versions are 2.18, 2.20, 3.0, etc. Milestones are not
restricted to numbers, thought - you can use any text strings, such
as dates.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Reporter:</emphasis>
The person who filed the bug.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>CC list:</emphasis>
A list of people who get mail when the bug changes.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Attachments:</emphasis>
You can attach files (e.g. testcases or patches) to bugs. If there
are any attachments, they are listed in this section.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*Dependencies:</emphasis>
If this bug cannot be fixed unless other bugs are fixed (depends
on), or this bug stops other bugs being fixed (blocks), their
numbers are recorded here.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>*Votes:</emphasis>
Whether this bug has any votes.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Additional Comments:</emphasis>
You can add your two cents to the bug discussion here, if you have
something worthwhile to say.</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
</section>
<section id="query">
<title>Searching for Bugs</title>
<para>The Bugzilla Search page is is the interface where you can find
any bug report, comment, or patch currently in the Bugzilla system. You
can play with it here:
<ulink url="&landfillbase;query.cgi"/>.</para>
<para>The Search page has controls for selecting different possible
values for all of the fields in a bug, as described above. For some
fields, multiple values can be selected. In those cases, Bugzilla
returns bugs where the content of the field matches any one of the selected
values. If none is selected, then the field can take any value.</para>
<para>Once you've run a search, you can save it as a Saved Search, which
appears in the page footer.</para>
<para>Highly advanced querying is done using Boolean Charts. See the
Boolean Charts help link on the Search page for more information.</para>
</section>
<section id="list">
<title>Bug Lists</title>
<para>If you run a search, a list of matching bugs will be returned.
</para>
<para>The format of the list is configurable. For example, it can be
sorted by clicking the column headings. Other useful features can be
accessed using the links at the bottom of the list:
<simplelist>
<member>
<emphasis>Long Format:</emphasis>
this gives you a large page with a non-editable summary of the fields
of each bug.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>CSV:</emphasis>
get the buglist as comma-separated values, for import into e.g.
a spreadsheet.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Change Columns:</emphasis>
change the bug attributes which appear in the list.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Change several bugs at once:</emphasis>
If your account is sufficiently empowered, you can make the same
change to all the bugs in the list - for example, changing their
owner.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Send mail to bug owners:</emphasis>
Sends mail to the owners of all bugs on the list.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Edit Search:</emphasis>
If you didn't get exactly the results you were looking for, you can
return to the Query page through this link and make small revisions
to the query you just made so you get more accurate results.</member>
<member>
<emphasis>Remember Search As:</emphasis>
You can give a search a name and remember it; a link will appear
in your page footer giving you quick access to run it again later.
</member>
</simplelist>
</para>
</section>
<section id="bugreports">
<title>Filing Bugs</title>
<para>Years of bug writing experience has been distilled for your
reading pleasure into the
<ulink
url="&landfillbase;page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html">
Bug Writing Guidelines</ulink>.
While some of the advice is Mozilla-specific, the basic principles of
reporting Reproducible, Specific bugs, isolating the Product you are
using, the Version of the Product, the Component which failed, the
Hardware Platform, and Operating System you were using at the time of
the failure go a long way toward ensuring accurate, responsible fixes
for the bug that bit you.</para>
<para>The procedure for filing a test bug is as follows:</para>
<orderedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Go to
<ulink url="&landfillbase;">
Landfill</ulink>
in your browser and click
<ulink
url="&landfillbase;enter_bug.cgi">
Enter a new bug report</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Select a product - any one will do.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Fill in the fields. Bugzilla should have made reasonable
guesses, based upon your browser, for the "Platform" and "OS"
drop-down boxes. If they are wrong, change them.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Select "Commit" and send in your bug report.</para>
</listitem>
</orderedlist>
<para>Try to make sure that everything said in the summary is also
said in the first comment. Summaries are often updated and this will
ensure your original information is easily accessible.
</para>
<para>
You do not need to put "any" or similar strings in the URL field.
If there is no specific URL associated with the bug, leave this
field blank.
</para>
<para>If you feel a bug you filed was incorrectly marked as a
DUPLICATE of another, please question it in your bug, not
the bug it was duped to. Feel free to CC the person who duped it
if they are not already CCed.
</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer">
<title>Patch Viewer</title>
<para>Viewing and reviewing patches in Bugzilla is often difficult due to
lack of context, improper format and the inherent readability issues that
raw patches present. Patch Viewer is an enhancement to Bugzilla designed
to fix that by offering increased context, linking to sections, and
integrating with Bonsai, LXR and CVS.</para>
<para>Patch viewer allows you to:</para>
<simplelist>
<member>View patches in color, with side-by-side view rather than trying
to interpret the contents of the patch.</member>
<member>See the difference between two patches.</member>
<member>Get more context in a patch.</member>
<member>Collapse and expand sections of a patch for easy
reading.</member>
<member>Link to a particular section of a patch for discussion or
review</member>
<member>Go to Bonsai or LXR to see more context, blame, and
cross-references for the part of the patch you are looking at</member>
<member>Create a rawtext unified format diff out of any patch, no
matter what format it came from</member>
</simplelist>
<section id="patchviewer_view">
<title>Viewing Patches in Patch Viewer</title>
<para>The main way to view a patch in patch viewer is to click on the
"Diff" link next to a patch in the Attachments list on a bug. You may
also do this within the edit window by clicking the "View Attachment As
Diff" button in the Edit Attachment screen.</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_diff">
<title>Seeing the Difference Between Two Patches</title>
<para>To see the difference between two patches, you must first view the
newer patch in Patch Viewer. Then select the older patch from the
dropdown at the top of the page ("Differences between [dropdown] and
this patch") and click the "Diff" button. This will show you what
is new or changed in the newer patch.</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_context">
<title>Getting More Context in a Patch</title>
<para>To get more context in a patch, you put a number in the textbox at
the top of Patch Viewer ("Patch / File / [textbox]") and hit enter.
This will give you that many lines of context before and after each
change. Alternatively, you can click on the "File" link there and it
will show each change in the full context of the file. This feature only
works against files that were diffed using "cvs diff".</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_collapse">
<title>Collapsing and Expanding Sections of a Patch</title>
<para>To view only a certain set of files in a patch (for example, if a
patch is absolutely huge and you want to only review part of it at a
time), you can click the "(+)" and "(-)" links next to each file (to
expand it or collapse it). If you want to collapse all files or expand
all files, you can click the "Collapse All" and "Expand All" links at the
top of the page.</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_link">
<title>Linking to a Section of a Patch</title>
<para>To link to a section of a patch (for example, if you want to be
able to give someone a URL to show them which part you are talking
about) you simply click the "Link Here" link on the section header. The
resulting URL can be copied and used in discussion. (Copy Link
Location in Mozilla works as well.)</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_bonsai_lxr">
<title>Going to Bonsai and LXR</title>
<para>To go to Bonsai to get blame for the lines you are interested in,
you can click the "Lines XX-YY" link on the section header you are
interested in. This works even if the patch is against an old
version of the file, since Bonsai stores all versions of the file.</para>
<para>To go to LXR, you click on the filename on the file header
(unfortunately, since LXR only does the most recent version, line
numbers are likely to rot).</para>
</section>
<section id="patchviewer_unified_diff">
<title>Creating a Unified Diff</title>
<para>If the patch is not in a format that you like, you can turn it
into a unified diff format by clicking the "Raw Unified" link at the top
of the page.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section id="hintsandtips">
<title>Hints and Tips</title>
<para>This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices
that have been developed.</para>
<section>
<title>Autolinkification</title>
<para>Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will
produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text.
However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain
sorts of text in comments. For example, the text
"http://www.bugzilla.org" will be turned into a link:
<ulink url="http://www.bugzilla.org"/>.
Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are:
<simplelist>
<member>bug 12345</member>
<member>comment 7</member>
<member>bug 23456, comment 53</member>
<member>attachment 4321</member>
<member>mailto:george@example.com</member>
<member>george@example.com</member>
<member>ftp://ftp.mozilla.org</member>
<member>Most other sorts of URL</member>
</simplelist>
</para>
<para>A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment,
you should put the word "bug" before it, so it gets autolinkified
for the convenience of others.
</para>
</section>
<section id="quicksearch">
<title>Quicksearch</title>
<para>Quicksearch is a single-text-box query tool which uses
metacharacters to indicate what is to be searched. For example, typing
"<filename>foo|bar</filename>"
into Quicksearch would search for "foo" or "bar" in the
summary and status whiteboard of a bug; adding
"<filename>:BazProduct</filename>" would
search only in that product.
</para>
<para>You'll find the Quicksearch box on Bugzilla's
front page, along with a
<ulink url="../../quicksearch.html">Help</ulink>
link which details how to use it.</para>
</section>
<section id="commenting">
<title>Comments</title>
<para>If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if
either you have something pertinent to say, or Bugzilla requires it.
Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bug mail.
To take an example: a user can set up their account to filter out messages
where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug
(which happens a lot.) If you come along, add yourself to the CC field,
and add a comment saying "Adding self to CC", then that person
gets a pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.
</para>
<para>
Don't use sigs in comments. Signing your name ("Bill") is acceptable,
if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style
four line ASCII art creations are not.
</para>
</section>
<section id="attachments">
<title>Attachments</title>
<para>
Use attachments, rather than comments, for large chunks of ASCII data,
such as trace, debugging output files, or log files. That way, it doesn't
bloat the bug for everyone who wants to read it, and cause people to
receive fat, useless mails.
</para>
<para>Trim screenshots. There's no need to show the whole screen if
you are pointing out a single-pixel problem.
</para>
<para>Don't attach simple test cases (e.g. one HTML file, one
CSS file and an image) as a ZIP file. Instead, upload them in
reverse order and edit the referring file so that they point to the
attached files. This way, the test case works immediately
out of the bug.
</para>
<para>Bugzilla stores and uses a Content-Type for each attachment
(e.g. text/html). To download an attachment as a different
Content-Type (e.g. application/xhtml+xml), you can override this
using a 'content-type' parameter on the URL, e.g.
<filename>&content-type=text/plain</filename>.
</para>
</section>
</section>
<section id="userpreferences">
<title>User Preferences</title>
<para>Once you have logged in, you can customise various aspects of
Bugzilla via the "Edit prefs" link in the page footer.
The preferences are split into three tabs:</para>
<section id="accountsettings" xreflabel="Account Settings">
<title>Account Settings</title>
<para>On this tab, you can change your basic account information,
including your password, email address and real name. For security
reasons, in order to change anything on this page you must type your
<emphasis>current</emphasis>
password into the
<quote>Password</quote>
field at the top of the page.
If you attempt to change your email address, a confirmation
email is sent to both the old and new addresses, with a link to use to
confirm the change. This helps to prevent account hijacking.</para>
</section>
<section id="emailsettings">
<title>Email Settings</title>
<para>On this tab you can reduce or increase the amount of email sent
you from Bugzilla, opting in our out depending on your relationship to
the bug and the change that was made to it.
</para>
<para>
You can also do further filtering on the client side by
using the X-Bugzilla-Reason mail header which Bugzilla
adds to all bugmail. This tells you what relationship you have to the
bug in question,
and can be any of Owner, Reporter, QAcontact, CClist, Voter and
WatchingComponent.</para>
<para>By entering user email names, delineated by commas, into the
"Users to watch" text entry box you can receive a copy of all the
bugmail of other users (security settings permitting.) This powerful
functionality enables seamless transitions as developers change
projects or users go on holiday.</para>
<note>
<para>The ability to watch other users may not be available in all
Bugzilla installations. If you can't see it, ask your
administrator.</para>
</note>
</section>
<section id="permissionsettings">
<title>Permissions</title>
<para>This is a purely informative page which outlines your current
permissions on this installation of Bugzilla - what product groups you
are in, and whether you can edit bugs or perform various administration
functions.</para>
</section>
</section>
<section id="reporting">
<title>Reports and Charts</title>
<para>As well as the standard buglist, Bugzilla has two more ways of
viewing sets of bugs. These are the reports (which give different
views of the current state of the database) and charts (which plot
the changes in particular sets of bugs over time.)</para>
<section id="reports">
<title>Reports</title>
<para>
A report is a view of the current state of the bug database.
</para>
<para>
You can run either an HTML-table-based report, or a graphical
line/pie/bar-chart-based one. The two have different pages to
define them, but are close cousins - once you've defined and
viewed a report, you can switch between any of the different
views of the data at will.
</para>
<para>
Both report types are based on the idea of defining a set of bugs
using the standard search interface, and then choosing some
aspect of that set to plot on the horizontal and/or vertical axes.
You can also get a form of 3-dimensional report by choosing to have
multiple images or tables.
</para>
<para>
So, for example, you could use the search form to choose "all
bugs in the WorldControl product", and then plot their severity
against their component to see which component had had the largest
number of bad bugs reported against it.
</para>
<para>
Once you've defined your parameters and hit "Generate Report",
you can switch between HTML, CSV, Bar, Line and Pie. (Note: Pie
is only available if you didn't define a vertical axis, as pie
charts don't have one.) The other controls are fairly self-explanatory;
you can change the size of the image if you find text is overwriting
other text, or the bars are too thin to see.
</para>
</section>
<section id="charts">
<title>Charts</title>
<para>
A chart is a view of the state of the bug database over time.
</para>
<para>
Bugzilla currently has two charting systems - Old Charts and New
Charts. Old Charts have been part of Bugzilla for a long time; they
chart each status and resolution for each product, and that's all.
They are deprecated, and going away soon - we won't say any more
about them.
New Charts are the future - they allow you to chart anything you
can define as a search.
</para>
<note>
<para>
Both charting forms require the administrator to set up the
data-gathering script. If you can't see any charts, ask them whether
they have done so.
</para>
</note>
<para>
An individual line on a chart is called a data set.
All data sets are organised into categories and subcategories. The
data sets that Bugzilla defines automatically use the Product name
as a Category and Component names as Subcategories, but there is no
need for you to follow that naming scheme with your own charts if
you don't want to.
</para>
<para>
Data sets may be public or private. Everyone sees public data sets in
the list, plus any private data sets they are subscribed to. You are
automatically subscribed to any data sets you create, but others may
subscribe to them too if they know about them. Only administrators can
make data sets public.
No two data sets, even two private ones, can have the same set of
category, subcategory and name. So if you are creating private data
sets, one idea is to have the Category be your username.
</para>
<section>
<title>Creating Charts</title>
<para>
You create a chart by selecting a number of data sets from the
list, and pressing Add To List for each. In the List Of Data Sets
To Plot, you can define the label that data set will have in the
chart's legend, and also ask Bugzilla to Sum a number of data sets
(e.g. you could Sum data sets representing RESOLVED, VERIFIED and
CLOSED in a particular product to get a data set representing all
the resolved bugs in that product.)
</para>
<para>
If you've erroneously added a data set to the list, select it
using the checkbox and click Remove. Once you add more than one
data set, a "Grand Total" line
automatically appears at the bottom of the list. If you don't want
this, simply remove it as you would remove any other line.
</para>
<para>
You may also choose to plot only over a certain date range, and
to cumulate the results - that is, to plot each one using the
previous one as a baseline, so the top line gives a sum of all
the data sets. It's easier to try than to explain :-)
</para>
<para>
Once a data set is in the list, one can also perform certain
actions on it.
For example, one can Subscribe to or Unsubscribe from a private
data set. This is useful if someone else has shown you a chart,
and you want to make some of their data sets appear in your list,
so you can use them in your own charts. One can also edit the
data set's parameters (name, frequency etc.) if it's one you
created or if you are an administrator.
</para>
<para>
Once you are happy, click Chart This List to see the chart.
</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>Creating New Data Sets</title>
<para>
You may also create new data sets of your own. To do this,
click the "create a new data set" link on the Create Chart page.
This takes you to a search-like interface where you can define
the search that Bugzilla will plot. At the bottom of the page,
you choose the category, sub-category and name of your new
data set.
</para>
<para>
If you have sufficient permissions, you can make the data set public,
and reduce the frequency of data collection to less than the default
seven days.
</para>
</section>
</section>
</section>
</chapter>
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