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>2.1. What is Bugzilla?</H1
><P
> 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.
</P
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>Bugzilla boasts many advanced features. These include:
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>Powerful searching</P
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>User-configurable email notifications of bug changes</P
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>Full change history</P
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>Inter-bug dependency tracking and graphing</P
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>Excellent attachment management</P
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>Integrated, product-based, granular security schema</P
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>Fully security-audited, and runs under Perl's taint mode</P
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>A robust, stable RDBMS back-end</P
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>Web, XML, email and console interfaces</P
></LI
><LI
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>Completely customisable and/or localisable web user
interface</P
></LI
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>Extensive configurability</P
></LI
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>Smooth upgrade pathway between versions</P
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>
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