A while ago, Johnath unleashed the Bugzilla Tweaks jetpack, which implemented Beltzner's original idea.  This jetpack adds the information regarding the history of a bug in a right-hand column on bug pages.  I liked it a lot, but I thought that it could be even better, and now I am releasing a tweaked version of that jetpack.

Let's see what this Jetpack does in action.  The below screenshot shows a change made to a bug while adding a comment.

Here, you can see that the status of the bug was changed from NEW to ASSIGNED, and the bug was assigned to dmandelin.

If the change was made without any comment on the bug, an entry is added between the two comments, with an indentation, which hopefully makes it easy for the eye to detect this entry subconciously.

Here, you can see that dvander has reviewed a patch, and has marked it r+.  If you want to know exactly when this change has been made, you can just move the mouse pointer over the name of the person who has made the change, and a tooltip shows the time that change was made.

The changes on each bug are shown interleaved with comments as above, with the exception of CC changes.  CC changes are usually not interesting, and they tend to add more clutter than useful information to the history of the bug.  If you want to view the CC history though, you are not out of luck, you can just right-click on the page and choose Show CC History, and all the CC changes will appear.  You can toggle them off by righ-clicking on the page and choosing Hide CC History.

You can see that several CC changes which had occurred between two comments have appeared.  Please note that the CC history visibility setting is not persisted, and each time a bug page is loaded, it will default to hiding the CC history.

Also, in the above screenshot you can see that if the person making the change has commented on the bug as well, their actual name is displayed, otherwise, only the email address will be displayed.

Another feature which is probably useful for drivers and those who triage bugs (among others) is that if a flag has changed during the lifetime of the bug, its name will be converted into a link, and clicking on it will take you to the latest change on the flag.  This both works for real Bugzilla flags and the "pseudo-flags" that we have been using for branch management lately.

To grab it while it's hot, make sure that you have the Jetpack engine installed.  If you have, when you visit this blog post, you should get a prompt that this page contains a Jetpack.  Just click the Install button and you're all set.

The source code for this jetpack lives in Johnath's user repository.  Suggestions, bug reports, and patches appreciated!