Custom fields administrative interface...

[Gervase Markham]

Sean McAfee wrote:
> ...is attached.  Untar it in Bugzilla's root directory to try it out.

Sean,

I haven't had (and may not have for a while) time to evaluate this 
particularly closely. Keeping up with all of this is a time-sink - and 
other Bugzilla hackers have noticed that, which is why your proposal has 
not yet had any substantive comments from them. But, having looked at 
the schema, it does seem that you have decided not to make the changes I 
suggested in our last conversation.

That's your prerogative, of course, but in my view, the structure of 
this CF implementation is too far off base to get checked into Bugzilla 
as-is. There's good stuff about it, but (just looking in the schema) two 
issues in particular leap out.

It seems pretty clear that Bugzilla needs only one bug activity tracking 
mechanism. So, for your patch to get in to Bugzilla, you either need to 
provide one which replaces the current one (together with migrating 
code) or you need to use the current one, enhancing it as necessary.

Secondly, the groups mechanism you are using is, in my view, unecessary, 
over-complicates things and would be confusing to users. The problem 
it's designed to be solved can be solved much more simply by a per-field 
multiselect of products, and a per-product multiselect of fields (on 
different pages, naturally), so admins can attack the mapping problem 
from both sides. (There would also be a per-group checkbox "add this 
field to new products", and a per-product checkbox, "add this product to 
new custom fields".)

> *  No stock Bugzilla tables are written to.  Only two, "bugs" and
>    "products", are read from.

This is a bug, not a feature. :-)

> *  The code does not yet support multiple locales.  If we all ultimately
>    agree that custom field display names belong in the database, as I aver,
>    then all that is needed is a few extra joins to a new table--cf_text,
>    perhaps.  Otherwise, more work is needed...

This discussion needs to continue - but I continue to assert that my 
precepts stated previously remain non-negotiable. I do think there's a 
way for us both to get what we want, though.

Gerv