history of Bugzilla?

[Matthew P. Barnson]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 12:37:43AM -0400, David Miller wrote:
> Jason Pyeron wrote:
> 
> >How old is bz?
> 
> No clue.  We should probably find out.

Terry Weissman initially released Bugzilla in late 1998.  I picked up
documentation in late 2000, by which time Terry had turned over
development to Tara Hernandez.

> >How old is 2.x?
> 
> Bugzilla 2.0 was actually the first thing Netscape open-sourced, very 
> shortly before Mozilla itself in September 1998.
> 
> Bugzilla 1.x was written in Tcl.  2.0 was the port to Perl because they 
> thought people would be more likely to contribute to it that way.

There were actually three versions (note: as the original documentation
maintainer, these are my understandings as I've observed and been told
things; like most historians, my opinion is often clouded and wrong, and
things didn't make as much sense in real life as they do in hindsight):

"Bugzilla 0" (umm, I just made up the revision) was Netscape's original
bug-tracking system.  Terry thought it was horrible and rewrote it in
TCL.  But it was called "Bugzilla".

"Bugzilla 1" was his initial effort in TCL.  People liked it so much
immediately that they began working with it.  Many of those original
bugs were numbers 1-50 -- which is why bugzilla.mozilla.org does not
have bug numbers below fifty.  Terry allocated that space to the old TCL
bug system.

Bugzilla 2 was the original Perl effort.  If you look at early Bugzilla
bugs, you'll find a lot of feature requests for ways to do things --
like editing the comments after they have been entered.  That's a
feature that has never been implemented, despite sitting in the buglist
for years, because people, apparently, LIKE the fact you can't go back
and edit your previous comment.

> I really want to get a history page up on the web site.  We should get a 
> bunch of this stuff written down while the people who made that history 
> can still be contacted. :)  (I didn't come on the scene until Bugzilla 
> 2.9 or so)

I did a lot of personal interviews via IRC with Terry in the early days
of my documentation effort.  However, that was still Bugzilla 2.8, so it
wasn't that much earlier than you.  Even at that point, Terry mainly
hung out in #mozwebtools to heckle people and make jokes.  He moved to a
new job while I was working on the docs.

-- 
Matthew P. Barnson
- - - -
Thought for the moment:
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