Bugzilla as a discussion forum

[Gervase Markham]

Christopher Heiny wrote:
> Maintaining running discussions in Bugzilla has proven extremely valuable 

No-one would disagree with you here. :-) What we are trying to do is 
work out where the balance is between giving people the facilities they 
need to discuss bugs, and turning Bugzilla into a web-based bulletin 
board, which both encourages pointless discussion and distracts us from 
making Bugzilla beer at its core competency.

I actually think that, right now, we are in a pretty good place.

> If the database gets bigger than our hard drive, we can buy another

I don't think anyone's concerned with database size; the comments table 
for b.m.o. is only a few tens of MB. (The attachments table dominates here.)

> 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.

Both these things are often true, but offer no help in deciding what 
features to include. As I'm sure you know, not all features people can 
write patches for are appropriate to include in any piece of software - 
there are a wide variety of things which might make it unsuitable.

For example, I personally believe that we have a duty to exclude 
features which encourage bad practice in bug tracking, or which start to 
morph Bugzilla into something else e.g. a project planning app. But this 
is probably not a unanimous opinion ;-)

Gerv