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Bugzilla for Java

What is the current status of Bugzilla?

I am honest. I am confused about the current status of Bugzilla. My personal environment does not list anyone or any project anymore that uses the most famous bug tracker software – for years. And this situation now seems to reflect in the current development activities in Bugzilla’s official GitHub repository. The last commit listed as of today was on February 1st, almost 3 months ago. Even worse: only 10 commits are logged within the last 12 months – on their active 5.2 branch. The last official release of Bugzilla was published even before that: on February 9th, 2019.

So it appears to me that the project dies a slow death – caused by the community that has migrated away to other bug trackers. And as sad as this seems, it is not a very surprising fact. Bugzilla was ignoring the needs of their users for too long. I remember a privacy issue to hide e-mail addresses from public that is still open (after many years). Bugzilla has become a dinosaur in a modern world. It is based on Perl, hard to setup on modern systems and misses many of the flexibility that other trackers integrated much faster.

Having said this, I am convinced now – more than ever – that my personal project B4J – Bugzilla for Java will not be maintained anymore. I will most likely fix bugs. But there will be no enhancement anymore.

Good-bye old friend, Bugzilla!