Bugzilla as a discussion forum

[Christopher Heiny]

> Thanks for all the work you folks do.
> Could I offer a contrary opinion on this thread?
> I think a cascade of opinions and discussion is inefficient in a bug 
> report. It clogs up the database, makes bugs hard to read, 
> and leads to 
> never-ending dissatisfaction with the comment mechanism.
> Mailing lists, and  BBSes, do a much better job of organizing 
> a debate. The 
> bug report can have a link to a thread on a BBS.
> Its a matter of concern to me, only because I have an 
> interest in avoiding 
> feature-bloat in Bugzilla.
> thanks again
> John

I'll offer a contrary contrary opinion.  One size does NOT fit all.

Our organization uses Bugzilla internally to track problems with our products.  Maintaining running discussions in Bugzilla has proven extremely valuable for a number of reasons:
	- all interested parties are reliably cc'ed on discussions
	- it's much harder to inappropriately forward the discussion
	- an archive of past discussion on an issue is immediately available to newcomers to the issue 
	- issue history and related files (via attachments) are centrally located and easily accessed

If the database gets bigger than our hard drive, we can buy another, bigger drive for a couple of hundred bucks.  That's just a few hours of engineering time - we used to lose far more than that on people hunting for customer reports, relevant data sheets, and so on.

Basic philosophy for things like this should be:
	+ just because a feature is useful to one group of user, doesn't mean it should be foisted on all users.
	+ just because one group of users does not find a feature useful, doesn't mean it should be crippled for all users.

							Chris