Once Upon a Time in Bugzilla Land

[Matty]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 20:40 -0500, Christopher Hicks wrote:

> 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.

Common isn't necessarily a good designation due to it's use to mean
"shared" but that is the basic idea I'm working from.

Even rare approval-type flags would however possibly appear in the
explicit section if you raised a ? on it.

> > 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?

Absolutely ... I was just lamenting the fact we didn't ensure this in
the first place.

> Does anybody have any interface inspirations?

I don't think the changing the interface is a big issue (except the
effect it has on the fields to the left), just that we can't use the
flags interface in a scalable fashion.

> > 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.  :)

Yeah, if.  I know this can be done, the question is if anyone will do
it, or if the developers want to get behind a drive to do it.

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

If I knew 'em, I'd mention 'em.  But just from 5-ish years of Bugzilla
experience I've seen enough to know there likely is stuff we haven't
realised yet.

One thing I'd thought about in the mean time though ... does keywords
and flags have reconcilable naming policies, ie what characters are
allowed?  what is the maximum length?  That sort of thing has to be
considered.