Bugzilla as a discussion forum

[Christopher Heiny]

Gervase wrote
> 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.

I agree.
[snip]
> > 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 ;-)

I agree with that, too.  I think you missed the point of my message, which is that changes should not be made (whether adding features, removing features, or crippling features) based on one or another group's use of Bugzilla.

One of the major strengths of Bugzilla is that it is flexible enough to be used in many different ways, without having a lot of features tuned to specific models of use.  This applies to both out of the box configuration and extensibility.