Custom fields

[J. Paul Reed]

On Sun, 24 Nov 2002, Gervase Markham wrote:

> So, should we support custom fields?
> http://joelonsoftware.com/news/20020912.html
>
> Thoughts?

He makes a very good point. And while I don't always *agree* with Joel, I
really do respect him as a software engineer; the vast majority of his
writings (or is that rantings?) are right on the mark.

Who wanted custom fields? And why did they want them?

I can easily see his point about that turning into a mess, inciting people
to create possibly hundreds of useless fields and file problems with their
own custom field setup as Bugzilla bugs.

Having said that, I know a lot of people (seem to) want it; maybe we can
put out on RFC on the newgroup or website saying "We've thought about
custom fields, but there are very good reasons *not* to do custom fields,
and Bugzilla users/"customers" are trading a lot of other possibly
significantly more useful features to have the BZ team work on custom
fields. Now then: *if* BZ had custom fields, *what* things would *you* make
a custom field?" And then let's monitor the response; if they're things
that would be better handled in comments the way they are now, then maybe a
page is in order explaining *why* custom fields don't exist in BZ 2.x, and
why the issue has been pushed back to await discussion in BZ 3.0.

I'll even volunteer now to write it up. ;-)

Later,
Paul
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  J. Paul Reed                 preed at sigkill.com || web.sigkill.com/preed
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