Bugzilla [1] is a bug tracking system that was constructed to handle issues raised against the Mozilla project. Originally written in Tcl it was ported to Perl by [Netscape] engineers. Bugzilla uses a MySQL database to hold the bug data and is accesed through CGI scripts written in Perl. Bugzilla is rapidly becoming the most widely used bug tracking system for open source projects. Notable installations include RedHat [2], ActiveState [3], OpenOffice [4] and of course the Mozilla project. The most recent versions of bugzilla provide a templating mechanism to permit sites to customize the HTML output without having to hack the perl source quite so much. [PT]

They seem to be pondering another language change[5], Tcl gets some flak in the comments [6]

SEH 20070514 -- Since the Bugzilla maintainers in the articles linked to above have done a good summary of the pros and cons of the languages they're thinking of adopting, it would be an interesting exercise in Tcl advocacy to develop a response comparing Tcl to the other languages under consideration, and make a pitch for Bugzilla to be re-implemented back into Tcl.

The earliest open-source version available from Mozilla [7] is bugzilla-2.0.tar.gz dated 1998-09-18 and weighing a mere 51kbytes. Unfortunately it is written in Perl and shell scripts. The earlier Tcl version was likely an internal project. RLH And from what I have read they moved away from Tcl because there aren't that many people a) that already know Tcl or b) that want to learn Tcl and contribute to bugzilla. There are going to keep it in Perl and do some refactoring of the code.

RLH Better yet, come up with a better ticketing system and use Tcl to build it.

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See also edit

• SCM
• gwyple

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