Give read only access in Bugzilla

Question

I've been researching this problem for an hour now and it's getting kind of frustrating. I have a project in Bugzilla that I need to give read only access to some users (our BRM team). When I go to groups, I only see two checkboxes: "Can add to this group" and "member of this group". When I'm googling this, though, other people manage to have three checkboxes: "Can add to this group" "Is a private member (write access)" and "Is a public member (read access)". The post I saw with that info was from 2005, and we're on version 4.4.2 now.

Now maybe I'm using the wrong approach altogether. My current line of attack is to use the group memberships to make them simply a read only member of the group. But I'm open to any other possible way to accomplish this, including custom scripting.

Answer 1

This suggestion (and this seems to confirm this worked for someone else as well) to go into each product (in Administration) and uncheck 'Open for bug entry' to prevent entering new bugs, then (using the Edit Group Access Controls on that page) for each product set 'canedit' on for some group with no one in it (the explanation on that page says that there will be a limitation only if at least one of the checkboxes is set, which is slightly confusing).

I still have to confirm that this works myself though, particularly since I can't find anything that confirms this also blocks commenting.

Answer 2

Bugzilla is a rather old Perl project. Not that many people can hack Perl anymore. Last time I hacked some changes to heavily customize our Bugzilla, but I would prefer not to touch that code anymore.

When we needed similar functionality, instead of hacking Perl I used the FOSwiki bugzilla plugin and DB query plugin. It allowed me to define queries, displaying relevant data from Bugzilla in a series of wiki tables, and create a link to the full bugzilla page for updates (which required login).

We considered migrating from Bugzilla to Trac (which is in Python, our preferred language, and has tight integration to wiki for tech docs), but it is lot of hassle (because we heavily customized Bugzilla to fit our process, with more than dozen custom fields, and would need to redo the customization). And one of these days we will do it - but not yet. When we do, customizing it would be much more fun.

But it's amazing (for me) how these old Perl projects (Bugzilla, FOSwiki) continue to deliver value a decade later.

Answer 3

You need to look at the Bugzilla site.

Group permissions are specified in the their documentation, section 3.10.4. Common Applications of Group Controls.