The Road to 2.18

[Matthew P. Barnson]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 08:27:24PM -0500, Christopher Hicks wrote:
> Bugzilla rocks and I appreciate
> everything folks have done through the years, but maybe people wouldn't be
> so pressed for time if newcomers didn't need to beat their head against
> the wall for so long before being accepted.

Just fork the code.  I'm not joking.  Many projects cross-fertilize from forks and sets of patches.  Just make sure to keep your fork current as a patch for the Bugzilla CVS HEAD, and enjoy allowing liberal patches to it.  Savannah.gnu.org and sourceforge.net are both excellent places to host such a project.  Heck, I'm a sysadmin for a living, and would gladly set up the resources to host such a project, as well.  Progress on a fork that makes it better than standard CVS Bugzilla would probably gain rapid, wide acceptance.

As long as people work to make sure the projects remain interoperable, such a fork can be a good thing.  My take on reticence towards massive changes in Bugzilla is that it stems from one simple historical phrase:

"Don't break bugzilla.mozilla.org."

I can understand both sides: one mainly interested in stability, one mainly interested in features.  A well-run fork (or set of patches) was a good thing for egcs & gcc, the Alan Cox Linux kernel, and progress on WINE (erm, that last one is just my opinion, you know :).  You never know what might happen.  That's the beauty of free software.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the subject.  If people are sufficiently dissatisfied with progress in a project, there's little sense in fighting about it when open source is so easy to fork and improve.

-- 
Matthew P. Barnson
- - - -
Thought for the moment:
The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie.
		-- Lenny Bruce