Granularity

[Myk Melez]

Gervase Markham wrote:

> Anyway, I think that we should standardise on the Product as the 
> granularity for all granular settings. Benefits:
>
> - never a need for a second "changing" screen when changing product.
> - simplicity in code (single variable to check) and database
> - consistent story to tell customisers
> - it makes semantic sense


These are all valid considerations, but most of them are about how we 
would like to perceive Bugzilla rather than how it could be most useful 
to us.  I too would like Bugzilla to be simple, consistent, and 
semantically sensible, but I'd rather have it be messy, inconsistent, 
and doing the things I need it to do.

Bugzilla's feature set grows primarily through the needs of its 
installations, and there's already been at least one demonstrated need 
for component-level specificity, not to mention lots of examples where 
even product-level specificity is not needed or is of such low priority 
that no one does it despite us all having talked about it for years.

We might (and do, I think, through discussions and the "make everything 
product-specific" bug 106592) promulgate this approach as a general 
principle, but we shouldn't block our developers and installations from 
deviating from it when necessary and useful.

-myk