Born out of a frustration of working with bugzilla, bugzini is a light-weight front-end with a primary focus on fast and easy searching and reading of bug reports.

Installation

bugzini is a self-contained webservice which serves a simple web application in the local browser. The only build dependency of bugzini is go, so make sure you have it installed first (at least version 1.1). Then, simply type make to make the self-contained bugzini application, containing the webservice and all required resources bundled inside.

Running

bugzini uses the XML-RPC API of bugzilla, and is currently only tested with the GNOME bugzilla (running version 3.4). It should work with other bugzilla's as well, if it does not, please report issues. To run bugzini, simply type ./bugzini which starts the service and prints the uri at which bugzini is served. Use -l to automatically launch the default browser with the bugzini uri. To change the remote bugzilla, use --bz-host to specify an alternative host name.

Getting started

When running bugzini initially, it might take some time to load the bugzilla projects. After the initial load, all projects are shown in a (searchable) sidebar on the left. To view bugs of a certain product, simply select it from the list. When a product is selected for the first time, all open bugs for that product are requested from the remote bugzilla. Again, this might take some time depending on the number of bugs and remote bugzilla.

After the initial load, everything is stored locally in the browser using IndexedDB and subsequent visits to the page should load locally and quickly without needing to contact bugzilla.

Search

bugzini has a special focus on making it easy to quickly search for bug reports. The search entry at the top of the page provides search as you type. A simple query language allows for searching in bug fields other than its summary (such as the severity or component) and features simple and/or type of queries.

term: search for term
term other: search for term OR other
"one term": search for one term
field:term: search for term in the specified field
!term other: search for term AND other
!(term other) next: search for (term OR other) AND next

The ! indicates that what follows is a necessary criteria for the search and allows for easy construction of AND type queries. For example, to look for all bugs containing crash with a severity of critical or major, use: !(severity:critical severity:major) crash

Note that search will only look at locally stored bug reports and only in the products selected in the sidebar. Furthermore, search does not look at comments in bug reports for the simple reason that bug comments are only retrieved (and stored) from the remote bugzilla once a bug report is opened.

Starring

Projects can be starred by clicking on the star on the left of the project name. Starred projects are sorted in the sidebar before other projects, and provide an easy way to quickly navigate projects that you are personally interested in. The special All Starred item in the sidebar will show bugs from all the starred products at once.

Creating bookmarks

Apart from products, custom search queries can be bookmarked and are shown in the sidebar. To bookmark a current search, click on the magnifying glass icon of the main bug search entry. A popup allows to type in a name for the new bookmark, which is then added in the sidebar. Selecting such bookmarks will show all bugs corresponding to the search criteria stored in the bookmark. Naturally, you can continue searching within this selection by using the search bar.

Synchronizing

After the initial load of bug reports for a product, subsequent visits will only look at locally stored bugs. Synchronization of reports for a product is currently triggered manually by the user by clicking on the refresh icon on the right of a product name (in the sidebar). This might change in the future to a more automatic, periodic synchronization.

Similar to e-mail, bugzini keeps track of which bug reports have had changes since the last time you synchronized. New reports and modified reports are marked such that it easy to see which reports contain new information since your last visit. Once a report is opened, it is marked as read and. Note that the initial load marks all bugs as read.