Howto Create a List of Bugs in a Blog Post

For the merging of Firefox 23, I created a list of bugs I attached to this blog. That became the basis of a post on Hacks describing the features in that release. If learning to use advanced search features in Bugzilla doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, don’t worry, you don’t have to read it!

This is how to create that list of bugs using Bugzilla, the Page Inspector in Firefox Developer Tools and maybe a bit of Scratchpad to fix the styling.

Since we have a lot of components in Firefox Developer Tools land, I’m going to use the Bugzilla Search interface rather than the more convenient Quicksearch API. You can certainly use that, but for this job, I think the Search screen is a bit easier.

First, setup your components. Your lists should look like this:

Note that I’ve selected RESOLVED, VERIFIED and CLOSED for my Status and FIXED for my resolution.

Next, click the Search by History option and enter the date range between this merge and the last. In this case, May 13th to June 24th.

Now you should be able to hit the Search button at the bottom of the page and get back a list of bugs. Sweet!

If you want to grab the list to plop into a blog post or Your Publishing Venue of Choice, you can open up the Page Inspector on this page (right click, Inspect Element, navigate the breadcrumbs until you find the table element) and then right clicking the element and picking “copy outer html”. This’ll copy the entire page fragment onto your clipboard for pasting into your editor.

You might want to select a different set of columns first. I just use Bug ID and Summary.

If you want to add or change the existing styling on the table rows, you can open a Scratchpad or Console and do something like:

[].forEach.call(document.querySelectorAll("tr"),
  (row) => row.removeAttribute("class"));

… and again for the TD elements.