Partial custom fields design document

[Daniel Berlin]

On Mar 26, 2004, at 5:14 PM, Joel Peshkin wrote:

> Daniel Berlin wrote:
>
>>>> People like Sean have tried to do this, but the discussion seems to 
>>>> be complicating things more and more...
>>>
>>>
>>> That's because it _is_ complicated :-)
>>>
>>
>> Only because it's continually being made more and more complicated by 
>> nit-picking it to death.
>> It doesn't have to be extremely complicated.
>>
> The proposal is not being held up by nit-picking, even though most of 
> the discussion seems to be centered around addressing the nits and 
> ignores the central issues...
>
This sounds a bit strange. It reads like "The proposal isn't being held 
up by nit picking, even though all people are doing to the proposal 
right now is picking nits".


> The central issues are....
> 1) Should fields with a 1:1 relationship to bugs be
>     a) placed in distinct fields of either bugs or another table that 
> has a 1:1 relationship to bugs
>   or
>     b) placed in a table that needs to be joined to bugs once for each 
> field
>

Again, either way could be changed to the other later on if it is found 
to be a large problem. I don't see why this is a "central issue" that 
must be decided right now.

> 1.5) Whatever is done must not trash performance on huge systems.

Of course, but we have no evidence it does, and there are ways to solve 
this problem later on if it becomes an issue, which nobody has actually 
shown it will be.

> 2) Should customfields be something that get created in the DB through 
> the web interface or should that function be seperate
>

Start with one, move to both.  (IE choose one and get it over with, no 
potential user has yet said that they would/would not use custom fields 
simply because of the lack of a web interface)

>
> So, please stop wangling on the nits and work to converge on the 
> central issues.

> If you feel picked on, look at how many iterations of the design 
> documents I went through on the group system rewrites. :-)
>

Why would i feel picked on, i am but a neutral observer in all of this. 
  :)

I would be a user of custom fields, except that i don't want to deal 
with maintaining even more changes to the bugzilla codebase than gcc 
already has.  I'm a compiler person/lawyer, i just happen to be 
responsible for maintaining our bug system.

--Dan