(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.
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.
For Bugzillas with the Sitemap extension, which now includes bugzilla.mozilla.org, you can search Bugzilla using Google, with site:bugzilla.mozilla.org.
Bugzilla supports ‘tags’ or taglike things in a number of ways:
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:
The Bugzilla tweaks addon for Firefox has the following features:
The history interleaving (for which there have been several jetpacks etc.) is particularly valuable. If you use bugzilla.mozilla.org, go get it :-)
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.
It is possible to search for who added comments to Bugzilla and when they did it. In boolean charts,
"Commenter" "is equal to" "<person>"
will find bugs to which that person has added a comment.
"A Comment" "changed before" / "changed after" "<date>"
finds bugs where a comment was added before or after a certain date. You can combine the two (must be in the same boolean chart in order to apply to the same comment) to look for bugs where a particular person added a comment before or after a certain date.
Example: all bugs you have commented on since June 18th 2010 (also uses pronoun substitution)
Mike Beltzner has made an excellent video on how to use Bugzilla Quicksearch. If you use Bugzilla for more than about ten minutes every day, then this is definitely worth 5 minutes 33 seconds of your time.
Sadly, free WordPress doesn’t seem to allow the <video> tag, so you’ll have to go to all the effort of clicking this link (Theora video).
My favourite part is right at the beginning, where Beltzner says breezily “OK! So, now I’m going to change your life!”, and in the background you can just hear Madhava’s entirely unimpressed “I see.”
[Historical correction: as Jesse has pointed out, although he was a great supporter and inspirer, Andreas Franke made Quicksearch, not him.]
This is only sort-of a Bugzilla tip (it’s more a Firefox tip), but it makes searching Bugzilla a lot quicker and easier.
In Firefox, head over to bugzilla.mozilla.org, right click on the Search box and hit “Add a Keyword for this Search…”. Give it the keyword “bug”.
Now, you can search Bugzilla directly from your URL bar using QuickSearch syntax, by typing “bug <terms>”.
Just a quick one this week: when linking to bugs, you can highlight particular comments (giving them a green background) by specifying the comment numbers like this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540&mark=63,100
You can combine that with a fragment identifier to jump straight to one of the comments you’ve highlighted:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=540&mark=63,100#c63
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