14. March 2011

Bugzilla 4.1.1 Development Release

by Max Kanat-Alexander (mkanat)

Less than a month after our release of 4.0, we have our first development snapshot, Bugzilla 4.1.1 available for you! This is our first release towards what will eventually be 4.2, and it’s got a bunch of new features. Here’s a really quick overview of what’s new in 4.2:

  • Bugzilla now sends bugmail in both text and HTML.
  • You can disable component, milestone, and version values.
  • You can now create an attachment by pasting it into a text field.
  • If you are using a modern web browser, then after you update a bug, the URL in your web browser will be the URL to view the bug. (So, pressing refresh will simply let you see the bug, and not try to update it again. Also, if you have “session restore” in your browser, it will load the bug instead of an error page.)
  • Comments are no longer automatically word-wrapped by the server, but are instead word-wrapped in the browser. This means that they are no longer exactly 80 characters wide–they are now wider.
  • Tabular reports now look nicer and can be sorted.
  • There is a new link, (take) that appears next to the Assignee field and allows you to assign a bug to yourself.
  • Bugzilla can now run on SQLite as its database system. This is experimental and should not yet be used for production systems.
  • You can now say that a custom field should only appear when any of a set of values are set on another field. (So, for example, you could say that a single field appears in multiple products.)
  • You can now choose to optionally (as a user preference) not have Quicksearch search bug comments.
  • The default list of columns for search results is now more sensible.
  • Bugzilla now audits most changes to most things in the system, and stores this auditing information in a table in the database. There is not yet a UI into this table.
  • The system for deciding how and when to store attachments on the disk (instead of in the database) has been simplified.
  • long_list.cgi, xml.cgi, and showattachment.cgi are gone. (They were not in use since a very old version of Bugzilla.) We also removed sidebar.cgi (the sidebar) because it wasn’t in use and future versions of Firefox will not support it.
  • You can search for bugs based on the number of comments that they have.
  • Also, you can add “number of comments” as a column in your search results.
  • Boolean charts now work sensibly for almost all fields. For example, searching for “CC is not equal to” now finds bugs where that user is not CC’ed, instead of all bugs that have at least one CC who isn’t that user. However, some of the old “magical” boolean chart functionality (such as searching for only attachment flags if you specify both a flag criterion and an attachment criterion) is temporarily missing while we redesign the search system.
  • By default, searches now only return 500 results. (You can click a link to see more.) Searches may also now never return more than 10,000 results.
  • The “See Also” field now accepts many more types of URLs. It also accepts simple bug numbers to refer to a bug in your current Bugzilla. Adding a local bug number to the “see also” field will also cause that bug’s “See Also” to point to this bug.
  • If you only have the “editcomponents” privilege for one or more products, you can now manage Flags for those products.
  • You can now specify “limit” and “offset” as URL parameters for all searches. These work much like their similar SQL equivalents.
  • You can now require a certain level of password complexity for your users.
  • When you run checksetup.pl to create a new Bugzilla database, it will print out far less information than it used to.
  • Almost all of the important information that checksetup.pl prints out can now be localized.
  • There is now a specific directory in bz\_locations (in Bugzilla::Constants) for where the pre-compiled templates are stored, that can be customized.
  • This release contains an initial implementation of a new tags system. The new UI for this tags system has not yet been implemented.
  • There is now a special group for moderating quips, so you don’t have to be an admin.
  • Bugzilla can now automatically detect the correct encoding for text attachments that aren’t in UTF-8.

Those are most of the major new changes that are in 4.1.1 over 4.0. We also have many other features planned for 4.2.

We hope that you enjoy testing Bugzilla 4.1.1 and we would love to hear your feedback, both on how the new features work and any bugs that you may find!