The Road to custome fields [was 2.18]

[Jon Wilmoth]

I appreciate the caution of overdoing custom fields and caution should
be exercised when considering this action.  Especially since part of the
beauty of BZ is it's simplicity to enter bugs/issues.

However, the user community here would greatly appreciate the ability to
capture department specific information (i.e. by product/product group
custom fields) that doesn't necessarily apply to other departments.  The
only way I see that happening is if it is easy for an administrator to
add fields.  If the admin has to hack templates and change a few files,
the upgrade path becomes extremely difficult and the usage of custom
fields becomes too costly in terms of total cost of ownership.  

-----Original Message-----
From: developers-owner at bugzilla.org
[mailto:developers-owner at bugzilla.org] On Behalf Of Gervase Markham
Sent: Monday, March 08, 2004 4:10 PM
To: developers at bugzilla.org
Subject: Re: The Road to custome fields [was 2.18]

Joel Peshkin wrote:
> 3) Perhaps we can back off of some of the challanges of custom fields
by 
> not requring it to happen entirely through the web interface and 
> assuming that anyone who wants to use them will be willing to make a
few 
> changes to some files, run checksetup, and even hack some templates.
If 
> we can keep users of customfields from having to understand the whole 
> schema and Serach.pm,  we have helped 90% of the users.

I'd actively say that we _don't_ want a web interface. If a 
point-and-click manager can add custom fields, we've actually done that 
company and all its Bugzilla users a big disservice, because their 
Bugzilla will get less and less usable.

We have that problem at my company. Our home-grown issue tracker has 
literally 40 fields, including three version fields.

Gerv
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