Custom Fields again

[Luis Villa]

On Tue, 2002-12-10 at 13:12, Gervase Markham wrote:
> This solution seems to me to get the worst features of custom fields 
> without getting any of the good ones. We all know that
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020912.html
> is why we are considering not having them. Joel argues that having 
> custom fields leads to people defining fields they don't really need, 
> field proliferation, and a a general muddle. 

The problem with Joel (as always) is that Joel knows that he is smarter
than you. And Joel is /always/ smarter than you. Which may be very
frequently true- certainly Joel is a smart guy, and he gives some very
good examples where custom fields aren't necessary but were requested
anyway, and I have several examples of my own. The problem is that I
also have examples of where they are quite needed, and 2+ years of
working with bugzilla doesn't seem to give me any way out short of
custom fields. Joel's article irritates me because he basically denies I
and my very real problems, which continue to complicate/block an upgrade
to 2.16, exist. Well, they exist, but if I were as smart as him, I'd
find a solution that didn't involve custom fields. [Or that's what he
thinks. I tend to disagree with him. :)

> Enough of this halfway house! :-) Let's have full custom fields, 
> implemented in a clean, generic and sensible way, or not at all. :-)

Agreed that the suggested implementation seems... unpleasant. My vote,
though, is Real Custom Fields, not none at all.

Luis [and sadly, I still don't have any time to get this done myself,
so... my vote probably doesn't/shouldn't count much except as a
high-profile user. :/