Autolinkification

Bugzilla’s comment autolinkifier will linkify the following things:

• bug 12345
• bug #12345
• comment 6
• comment #6
• bug 12345, comment 6 (and other variations with a #)
• attachment 67890
• URLs for the following schemes: ‘afs’, ‘cid’, ‘ftp’, ‘gopher’, ‘http’, ‘https’, ‘irc’, ‘mailto’, ‘mid’, ‘news’, ‘nntp’, ‘prospero’, ‘telnet’, ‘view-source’, ‘wais’
• Duplicate markers

These will only linkify if the bug exists – “bug 10000000″ will not autolinkify until you have that many bugs.

Note that it doesn’t linkify bare numbers, so if you are talking about other bugs, please put the word “bug” before each of them. (Note also that the word “bug” is customizable system-wide – everywhere else as well as autolinkification).

Bugzilla also provides the ability to hook into this mechanism using the bug_format_comment hook, so an admin can extend it to autolinkify any text you like. If you have ideas for text you’d like autolinkified on bugzilla.mozilla.org, file a bug about it.

Alternative Data Formats

If you want data out of Bugzilla in some format other than an HTML web page, Bugzilla can support that. The “ctype” parameter takes a short name for a content type. Valid ctypes include:

• Bugs: xml (using a custom Bugzilla schema)
• Bug lists: js, ics, atom, rdf (which is XML), csv
• Reports: csv

So you can subscribe to a buglist using Atom, or import it into a spreadsheet using CSV. For security reasons, the JS template is limited to public bugs only.

You can also get all this data and more as XML or JSON from the built-in RPC API, and as JSON or unstable XML from the RESTful BzAPI.For these two formats, these APIs are the recommended way to get data.

New formats can be created simply by dropping a template into the relevant directory on a Bugzilla installation. So if there are formats you’d like, say so :-)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?resolution=—&query_format=advanced&component=Bugzilla-General&product=Bugzilla&ctype=csv

Neat BzAPI Tools

Atul Varma has built some very cool tools using the Bugzilla REST API:

• User Dashboard – shows things you need to review, bugs assigned to you, ones you reported recently and other useful lists.
• User Finder – put your Bugzilla username and password in the first two fields, and the person you are searching for in the third one. Handy for knowing what someone’s email address is to CC them. You can also use this to make your own Dashboard by searching for yourself then hitting the button.
• Bug Filer – automatically finds products and components matching a string, and takes you to an Enter Bug page for that component. This one is a bit slow, but we checked in two fixes this week to Bugzilla core to speed up config.cgi which (indirectly) supplies the data, so hopefully they’ll make it to b.m.o. before too long.
• For Hg users, he’s also working on a qexportbz command to match qimportbz, but it’s not quite ready yet.

You can hear and see him demoing them in the (open) video of the WeeklyUpdate meeting from yesterday, which is embedded at the top of the meeting’s wiki page. Starts 2 minutes in.

He said: “To alleviate some of my major pain points, I decided to look into Gerv’s RESTful API for Bugzilla. So I used that to make some tools”. That’s exactly what the BzAPI was created for. Go Atul! And everyone else, please do the same!

bugzilla.mozilla.org URL shorteners and shortcuts

Fed up of typing https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=549867 ?

Firstly, it’s a great idea to set up a “bug” keyword in Firefox. So you can type (or, often more usefully, paste from an email) “bug 123456″ into your URL bar and have the Right Thing happen. The URL you need is:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s

Right-click, select “Bookmark This Link” and type “bug” into the “keyword” box.

Secondly, the handily-named bugzil.la URL shortener permits e.g.:

http://bugzil.la/466419

http://bugzil.la/<some quicksearch string>

(Thanks to Reed for making that happen.) This is good if you are attempting to squeeze an important message into, say, 140 characters. In case anyone was wondering, “.la” is Laos.

Email Replies to Bugzilla Comments

sdwilsh has written a Thunderbird addon called Bugzilla Helper (not to be confused with the Bugzilla Helper which guides you through bug submission). It allows you to press Reply when viewing a bugmail, and instead of popping up an email addressed to a non-working address (not helpful), will instead give you a window to type your comment in, helpfully quoting the previous comment. When you hit Submit, it will add your comment via the BzAPI.

So you can now reply to bugmail :-)

Linkify Like A Bugzilla Comment

Have you ever had a chunk of text and wished you could apply the Bugzilla comment autolinkifier to it?

• Autolinkified URLs, bug numbers and attachment numbers (with “details” link)
• Bug numbers have the bug title as the tooltip
• Strikeout style for closed bugs

Wish no longer.

This could be handy for e.g. some wiki text involving a load of bug numbers.

Getting bugzilla.mozilla.org Changed Quickly

Sometimes you need bugzilla.mozilla.org’s configuration changed – components, milestones or flags added, embarrassing attachments annulled, that sort of thing. Fortunately, we have a crack team of admins who deal with these requests, mostly within 24 hours. But for super-speed, it helps if you provide all the required information up front.

Fortunately, there is now a Bugzilla Administration wiki page which lists the info you need to provide for each sort of request. Consult that first and do what it says, and you are more likely to get hyperspeed service.

TidyBug: Simplified Bug Display

Jesse Ruderman’s TidyBug GreaseMonkey script (docs) turns this:

into this:

‘Nuff said.

Client-Side Bugmail Filtering

Everyone who uses Bugzilla seriously gets a lot of bugmail. Bugzilla provides controls so you can restrict the amount of it you get. But did you know it also adds headers to each email so you can do further filtering on the client side?

Here are a sample set of headers, with explanations:

X-Bugzilla-Reason:	CC	(the role you have on the bug which led to you getting the mail; other values are AssignedTo, QAcontact)
X-Bugzilla-Type:	changed	(other value is ‘new’)
X-Bugzilla-Watch-Reason:	QAcontact places@firefox.bugs	(the role of the person you are watching, and who it is, if you are getting bugmail for that reason)
X-Bugzilla-Who:	gerv@mozilla.org	(the person who made the change)
X-Bugzilla-Changed-Fields:	AssignedTo Status	(the names of the fields changed by the update)
X-Bugzilla-URL:	https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

The following headers give the values of particular bug fields after the change in question has been made.

X-Bugzilla-Classification:	Client Software
X-Bugzilla-Product:	Firefox
X-Bugzilla-Component:	Places
X-Bugzilla-Keywords:	crash, regression
X-Bugzilla-Severity:	major
X-Bugzilla-Status:	NEW
X-Bugzilla-Priority:	P2
X-Bugzilla-Assigned-To:	mconnor@mozilla.com
X-Bugzilla-Target-Milestone:	Firefox 3.6

You can use any of these, or a combination, as a trigger to do something different with a bugmail – file it somewhere, tag it, mark it as read or delete it.

To set up filters in Thunderbird 3, go to Tools | Message Filters… . If you click “New” to add a new filter, and then scroll down to the bottom of the list of headers and other values you can filter on, you will find “Customize…” This allows you to enter custom header values, such as the X-Bugzilla headers above.

Pronoun Substitution

It’s fairly easy to create a URL which does a search for “bugs reported by gerv@mozilla.org“. Whoever clicks it, you get the same thing – all bugs reported by that particular user. But you can also create a URL which does a search for something like “bugs reported by the user running this search”. This means you can share it with others, and have them find the bugs which apply to them.

This is done with “pronouns”. These only work with boolean charts (bug). The left hand side of the chart can be any field which expects an email address. The operator must be “is equal to” or “is not equal to”. The right hand side then can be of the following values: “%reporter%”, “%assignee%”, “%qacontact%”, or “%user%”. These do exactly what you might expect.

Examples:

• open bugs reported by you but assigned to someone else
• open bugs assigned to you
• open bugs assigned to their reporter