Once Upon a Time in Bugzilla Land (custom fields)

[Matty]

On Mon, 2004-12-13 at 18:46 -0800, Stuart Donaldson wrote:

> Yes, Flags and Keywords are similar enough that it is worth looking at 
> how to combine them.  But it would be far better to put that brain power 
> into getting a custom fields solution and then make flags and keywords 
> instances of custom fields.

In my mind keywords already are customised boolean fields.  So we're 15%
of the way there (yay!).  It's just the other type of fields that are
missing.  I'm not sure if we need to change the keywords fields at all.

Sure, you might like more than one keywords UI-field, with different
keywords available, but that's real low priority compared to the other
field types.  And it does nothing to fix the problems I'm talking about
- most of the deficiencies of keywords are also problems with flags.

There's also something to be said for fixing what you have before doing
new stuff.  To a certain extent, fixing keywords will require
enhancements, but they're polishing enhancements on the existing
features.

And you seem to be implying we should concentrate all our energy on
customised fields.  The project is never going to work that way.  There
are always going to be multiple things being worked upon by different
people with different skills and interests.  You don't need to deprecate
other issues to get your issue forward, it should be able to stand on
its own merits.

But you don't have to convince me of the benefit of customised fields to
me.  I worked on customised resolutions precisely because I saw our
deficiencies in customisation.

I haven't managed to get that in yet (although I intend on it RSN), but
that should tell you this is nothing personal to the non core developers
who have worked on this, since (I believe) I've been involved with
Bugzilla for longer than anyone else except the dearly metaphorically
departed.

These things are huge changes to the core of Bugzilla, take a lot of
effort and a lot of consideration.  I know having worked on custres,
that these sort of changes often have massively far reaching effects
that are difficult to anticipate.  These need to be considered before
elevating the code from patch-quality to cvs-quality, especially on a
change of that magnitude.

I will continue to work on customisation, and push for custfields.  But
even if all of our developers suddenly woke up wish a burning desire to
have custfields yesterday, it will not suddenly appear.  It'll take
time.

There probably has been considerable slackness on custfields, but that's
volunteerism for you.  We do claim to be better, but not perfect.  And
far from it sometimes.