Quicksearch Reference

“Quicksearch” is a way of searching Bugzilla using simple yet powerful syntax. The search box at the top of every page supports it.

Jesse Ruderman has written a wonderful Quicksearch Reference – a must-read if you search Bugzilla a lot.

Even Faster Quicksearches

To speed up quicksearches, limit the search by product or component. Add “comp: <string>” to your query to limit it to components whose names contain that string. As an abbreviation, you can simply use “:” instead of “comp:”, although that also searches in products whose names which contain the string.

By analogy with the use of “:”, there are abbreviations for some other common fields as well.

(Thanks to Ben Hearsum and Ed Morley)

Faster Quicksearches

Another guest post from Stefan Arentz:

“If you do a lot of quick searches to find bugs by summary and you don’t care about also looking into the comments of those bugs, flip the “Include comments when performing quick searches (slower)” to NO in your preferences.

A search for ‘radio antenna’ just went down from 30+ seconds to just a few seconds.”

HTML Email

Guest tip from Stefan Arentz:

“Bugzilla actually does have HTML emails! [As of version 4.2, but it's been backported to bugzilla.mozilla.org's 4.0 installation - Ed.] I always though that it did not because I did not look further than the “Email Preferences” tab. But there actually is a “Preferred email format” under the “General Preferences” tab.

This makes Bugzilla emails 100x easier to read on a phone.”

User Menu

(If you have tips to share on using Bugzilla, please email them to gerv@mozilla.org.)

Mozilla’s Bugzilla now has a left-click menu whenever you see a user displayed. You can email the user (which was the previous left-click action, or see what they’ve been up to in Bugzilla recently on the Activity screen. Administrators can also jump straight to editing that user’s account.

Change Your Bugzilla Email

Just changed email address?

Unlike many sites, it is possible in Bugzilla to change your login name/username/email address. I can be done in the Preferences, on the Email Preferences tab, with the box marked “New Email Address”.

This is much preferred to creating a new account and then trying to migrate all of your CCs and watchlists, or realising you did the wrong thing and asking an admin to ‘merge’ the accounts. If you have created a new account for your new address but not really used it yet, and want to “undo” your mistake, change the address for the new account to something throwaway, and then change the address for the old account to your new real email address. If you have used both accounts significantly, you’ll have to ask the admins to do a merge. Not all Bugzilla admins may be able to do this, as it’s not a supported feature of the software with a UI.

Search Bugzilla Using Google

For Bugzillas with the Sitemap extension, which now includes bugzilla.mozilla.org, you can search Bugzilla using Google, with site:bugzilla.mozilla.org.

Tagging

Bugzilla supports ‘tags’ or taglike things in a number of ways:

• Keywords
• Freeform, in the status whiteboard
• Its own tagging implementation

You may not have heard of the last of these because it’s disabled by default. Head over to your Preferences, the General Preferences tab, and turn “Enable tags for bugs” to On. This adds new UI to your footer: “add the tag [        ] to bugs [        ]“. You can type a tag name and some bug numbers here, and those bugs will be tagged. Once you have one or more tags defined, you’ll also get the option of adding existing tags to a list of bug numbers.

The tagging system is built on top of saved searches, so:

• by default only you can see the tag and get the list of bugs tagged
• links appear in the footer for each tag (but can be removed)
• you can share the “search” with a Bugzilla group

Bugzilla Tweaks addon for Firefox

The Bugzilla tweaks addon for Firefox has the following features:

• Interleaving the bug’s change history with the comments on the same page
• Showing the last time that a bug or attachment flag was changed
• Proving user name autocompletion support
• “Assign To Me” button

The history interleaving (for which there have been several jetpacks etc.) is particularly valuable. If you use bugzilla.mozilla.org, go get it :-)

Quicksearch Facelift

With the release of Bugzilla 3.6, the already-awesome Quicksearch got a facelift. That linked page is now a tutorial on all its excellent capabilities. bugzilla.mozilla.org recently upgraded to 3.6, so they can all now be used on that site.