Custom fields design doc

[Gervase Markham]

Sean McAfee wrote:

> Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:
> 
>>The invariants for our current localisation strategy are:
>>
>>- There should be a single localisation mechanism.
>>- A localiser should be able to create a tarball which, when unzipped,
>>  places files which totally enable a Bugzilla for their language.
>>- An admin should be able to unzip said tarball, add the code for the
>>  language to a param, and all of Bugzilla starts working in that
>>  language, as well as the ones it currently works in.
>>- Bugzilla can be used at the same time by different people in different
>>  languages.
> 
> It seems to me that a distinction can be drawn between relatively
> static localized text, such as the static content of an HTML document,
> and relatively variable localized text, such as field display names or
> the labels of a selection field, either of which an administrator might
> update frequently.  The former clearly belongs in a template file, but it's
> not so obvious to me that the latter does as well.

I agree that this is not as obvious. Do you have another solution which 
maintains the invariants (or breaks them, but explains why it's not bad 
to break them in that particular way)?

>>The first thing is invariant because it makes Bugzilla hackers lives as 
>>easy as possible.
> 
> Modifying template files in-place programmatically, with all of the
> necessary locking mechanisms, doesn't seem particularly easy.

I don't know about other OSes, but Unix seems to do a pretty good job of 
making sure someone doesn't try and read a file while someone else is 
writing to it :-)

> But custom field information is metadata particular to a specific
> Bugzilla installation.  Obviously it's desirable to be able to unpack
> (say) a French localization tarball onto an existing installation and
> have Bugzilla immediately start presenting pages in French, but of what
> use would it be to include in that tarball localization information
> for custom fields from some other installation that don't exist in the
> target installation?

Because it could be that some of Bugzilla's default fields move to using 
the custom field mechanism.

Gerv