2.7. Pro Tips

This section distills some Bugzilla tips and best practices that have been developed.

2.7.1. Autolinkification

Bugzilla comments are plain text - so typing <U> will produce less-than, U, greater-than rather than underlined text. However, Bugzilla will automatically make hyperlinks out of certain sorts of text in comments. For example, the text http://www.bugzilla.org will be turned into a link: http://www.bugzilla.org. Other strings which get linkified in the obvious manner are:

  • bug 12345

  • bugs 123, 456, 789

  • comment 7

  • comments 1, 2, 3, 4

  • bug 23456, comment 53

  • attachment 4321

  • mailto:george@example.com

  • george@example.com

  • ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

  • Most other sorts of URL

A corollary here is that if you type a bug number in a comment, you should put the word “bug” before it, so it gets autolinkified for the convenience of others.

2.7.2. Comments

If you are changing the fields on a bug, only comment if either you have something pertinent to say or Bugzilla requires it. Otherwise, you may spam people unnecessarily with bugmail. To take an example: a user can set up their account to filter out messages where someone just adds themselves to the CC field of a bug (which happens a lot). If you come along, add yourself to the CC field, and add a comment saying “Adding self to CC”, then that person gets a pointless piece of mail they would otherwise have avoided.

Don’t use sigs in comments. Signing your name (“Bill”) is acceptable, if you do it out of habit, but full mail/news-style four line ASCII art creations are not.

If you feel a bug you filed was incorrectly marked as a DUPLICATE of another, please question it in your bug, not the bug it was duped to. Feel free to CC the person who duped it if they are not already CCed.

This documentation undoubtedly has bugs; if you find some, please file them here.