The Road to 2.18

[Gervase Markham]

Stuart Donaldson wrote:

> Gervase Markham wrote:
>> Indeed. And that's something we want to maintain. Locking down the 
>> schema is to be avoided - because we want to be able to say "actually, 
>> this is all wrong, we want to do it differently."

Let me clarify this.

For a change of this magnitude, it would be wrong to lock down the 
schema until the Bugzilla core team has:

- decided whether we want custom fields at all
- if we do, written a design for them
- written the actual patch (either based on existing one, or different)
- checked it in.

At that point, and that point only, there is an onus on us to provide 
migration paths.

The key point to grasp is that _writing_ a custom fields patch is not 
the hard part of this process. The hard part is agreeing that we want 
it, and how to do it. There are several very different ways one could 
approach the problem.

So far, no-one on the core team has had enough time to spare, or 
prioritised this high enough, for it to happen. And although the 
decision on what code to accept is justdave's, the list of people that 
_I_ personally would trust to do this work is not very long at all. The 
serious consequences that could arise if we mess this up mean that this 
is not a situation where we can knock something together and refine it 
incrementally.

Custom fields are obviously important to a number of Bugzilla users. Up 
to this point, though, self-evidentially other things have been more 
important to the core team. You may not like this, or agree with it. 
Sorry about that, but there you go.

The great thing about Free software is that people can take it in 
another direction if they like. That's what the custom fields patch 
basically is. If the people maintaining that patch want to set up a 
website, or a wiki, or a mailing list, to make it easier for those who 
want it to get it, that's fine. But we won't and can't promise that that 
particular patch will get integrated, or that whatever patch does get 
integrated will work anything like that one, or that one of us will 
write migration code.

Gerv