Once Upon a Time in Bugzilla Land

[Christopher Hicks]

Keywords seem to provide slightly less functionality than flags so I'm 
going to talk about the rest of this in terms of extending flags and 
killing keywords.

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Matty wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 15:17 -0500, Christopher Hicks wrote:
>> Couldn't the keywords and flags functionalities be cleanly integrated?
>> The dissimilarity of their interfaces seems wrong.
>
> They could be clearly integrated, although the dissimilarity is possibly
> a feature, where commonly used keywords appear explicitly.

What about designating certain flags as "common" so that they appear as 
flags do now and the rest don't appear.  One of the big annoyances with 
flags is that they only work for things that you want to appear all the 
time.  If uncommon flags could "somehow" be added to bugs if needed and 
common flags would always appear regardless of whether their state.

> Having two different systems each having a different UI is a mistake 
> going forward though.

Precisely.

> One problem with merging the two would be clashing names, which might
> just dictate automatic renaming of keywords or flags if necessary.

Appending an integer should fix this, but it begs the question: isn't it a 
bit foolish to have flags and keywords named the same thing?

>>> You couldn't replace any one with one of the others.
>> What can keywords do that flags can't?  Ignore the current interface.
>
> ... which is the main issue (scalability).

Does anybody have any interface inspirations?

> But another thing is that I'm pretty sure flags can't be displayed on 
> bug list (there's a bug on that), because there's a keyword cache but 
> not a flag cache.

If we kill keywords we can steal the keyword cache for flags.  :)

> I'm pretty sure there would be other issues on the periphery too.

Such as?

> So flags certainly could supersede keywords, but given past experience 
> with tags, it won't _just happen_ automagically.

True enough.

-- 
</chris>

"Fans of Mozilla's free, open-source Firefox browser make the
ardent Apple faithful look like a bunch of slackers."
- Rebecca Lieb at clickz.com