Chapter 6. Bug-tracking Backends

6.1. Bugzilla

Bugzilla is an enterprise-class piece of software that tracks millions of bugs and issues for hundreds of organizations around the world.

Bugzilla does not provide a public interface for SCM integration. Nevertheless, the Scmbug daemon attempts to reuse functionality already available in the Perl-based Bugzilla libraries. As a result, the source code used to host a Bugzilla instance must be locally accessible by the daemon. The installation_directory variable is used to define the location of the Bugzilla source installation as shown in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1. Bug-tracker installation directory for Bugzilla.

# Used for Bugzilla and RequestTracker.
#
# Path to the directory of the bugtracker sources providing an
# API that the daemon can use
installation_directory => '/usr/share/bugzilla/lib'
	    

Additionally, the installed_locally variable is used to flag whether Bugzilla is installed locally on the same machine the daemon is running as shown in Figure 6-2. This is required to flush Bugzilla's version cache when SCM tags are added or deleted, and immediately reflect tag manipulation to Bugzilla's user interface.

Figure 6-2. Bug-tracker installed locally variable.

# Used only for Bugzilla.
#
# Flags whether the live bugtracker instance is installed
# locally on the same machine the daemon is running
installed_locally => 1,
	    

Note

For example, it is possible to install Bugzilla in machine A, and install a duplicate Bugzilla source in machine B where Scmbug is installed. In this scenario installation_directory would be set to Bugzilla's source code path on machine B, but the variable installed_locally would be set to 0.

The Bugzilla developers are planning to provide a formal SCM integration interface in future releases.

As of version 2.22.0, Bugzilla does not yet support a mapping of the SCM username to a Bugzilla username. An SCM to bug-tracking username mapping is accomodated by the integration daemon using the userlist variable, as described in Section 4.4.8.

Bugzilla currently lacks a per-bug comment id. This makes it very difficult to accurately report the comment ids in a VDD for Bugzilla. Currently, the VDD comment ids are prefixed with the string "inaccurate_".

Scmbug has been verified to work against the following releases of Bugzilla: