Hacking Bugzilla

The Bugzilla Guide
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# D.5. Hacking Bugzilla

What follows are some general guidelines for changing Bugzilla, and adhering to good coding practice while doing so. We've had some checkins in the past which ruined Bugzilla installations because of disregard for these conventions. Sorry for the lack of formatting; I got this info into the Guide on the day of 2.14 release and haven't formatted it yet.

The following is a guide for reviewers when checking code into Bugzilla's
CVS repostory at mozilla.org. If you wish to submit patches to Bugzilla,
you should follow the rules and style conventions below. Any code that
does not adhere to these basic rules will not be added to Bugzilla's
codebase.
1. Usage of variables in Regular Expressions
It is very important that you don't use a variable in a regular
expression unless that variable is supposed to contain an expression.
This especially applies when using grep. You should use:
grep ($_ eq $value, @array);
- NOT -
grep (/$value/, @array);
If you need to use a non-expression variable inside of an expression, be
sure to quote it properly (using \Q..\E).
Coding Style for Bugzilla
-------------------------
While it's true that not all of the code currently in Bugzilla adheres to
this styleguide, it is something that is being worked toward. Therefore,
we ask that all new code (submitted patches and new files) follow this guide
as closely as possible (if you're only changing 1 or 2 lines, you don't have
to reformat the entire file :).
1. Whitespace
Bugzilla's prefered indentation is 4 spaces (no tabs, please).
2. Curly braces.
The opening brace of a block should be on the same line as the statement
that is causing the block and the closing brace should be at the same
indentation level as that statement, for example:
if ($var) {
print "The variable is true";
} else {
print "Try again";
}
- NOT -
if ($var)
{
print "The variable is true";
}
else
{
print "Try again";
}
3. File Names
File names for bugzilla code and support documention should be legal across
multiple platforms. \ / : * ? " < > and | are all illegal characters for
filenames on various platforms. Also, file names should not have spaces in
them as they can cause confusion in CVS and other mozilla.org utilities.
4. Variable Names
If a variable is scoped globally ($::variable) its name should be descriptive
of what it contains. Local variables can be named a bit looser, provided the
context makes their content obvious. For example, $ret could be used as a
staging variable for a routine's return value as the line |return $ret;| will
make it blatently obvious what the variable holds and most likely be shown
on the same screen as |my $ret = "";|.
5. Cross Database Compatability
Bugzilla was originally written to work with MySQL and therefore took advantage
of some of its features that aren't contained in other RDBMS software. These
should be avoided in all new code. Examples of these features are enums and
encrypt().
6. Cross Platform Compatability
While Bugzilla was written to be used on Unix based systems (and Unix/Linux is
still the only officially supported platform) there are many who desire/need to
run Bugzilla on Microsoft Windows boxes. Whenever possible, we should strive
not to make the lives of these people any more complicated and avoid doing things
that break Bugzilla's ability to run on multiple operating systems.

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