What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Mick Weiss]

Christopher Hicks wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Gervase Markham wrote:
> 
>> Christopher Hicks wrote:
>>
>>>> Changing to 'work items' is a mental jump onto the slippery slope to 
>>>> a task-management system.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm running down that slide as fast as I can.
>>
>>
>> Yeah, Chris, we know you are :-)
> 
> 
> My failings don't include an inability to be vocal.  :)
> 
>> The problem is, last time we talked about it, the current project 
>> direction was to avoid going that way.
> 
> 
> I understand that.  I respect the motivations than went into that 
> choice. But when other projects are being written that do bug, task, 
> wiki and version tracking in a seemlessly integrated way bugzilla runs 
> the risk of being relegated to the also-rans.  I personally think that 
> would be tragic and I'd rather get teeth extracted than run PHP or 
> Python for my daily work.

I resent that. I'm a PHP programmer :-P

> 
> Given the recent directions of opening up better cleaner interfaces for 
> interacting with bugzilla I'm hopeful that a variety of existing 
> technologies (wiki, svn, cvsmonitor, viewcvs, my existing billing code, 
> etc.) can be integrated into a bugzilla superset which will make my life 
> easier and not incur the steep uphill climb that having these things 
> added to bugzilla would obviously entail.
> 
>> I guess if Dave wants to change that (or if I've completely 
>> misunderstood him ;-), he'll re-open the discussion, but until then if 
>> you try to get more task management features into Bugzilla, all 
>> that'll happen is that you'll increasingly come into conflict with the 
>> other developers.
> 
> 
> I don't think that would be healthy for me or bugzilla.  I'd really like 
> to convince people that a single-value primary key on longdescs would be 
> good though.  (Bug 225221 if you're interested.)  Given that I haven't 
> managed to do that yet, I'm in no way deluded enough to try to make a 
> significant contribution directly to bugzilla.  I'm trying to answer 
> moz-webtools list questions that I have some ability to help with or 
> that Dave doesn't get to first and work on bringing together a small 
> team to work on this bugzilla superset idea that I mentioned a few weeks 
> ago, so I haven't given up on bugzilla or helping the bugzilla 
> community, but indirect contributions seem much more effective at this 
> stage.
> 
>> (This is a general comment, and doesn't reflect a particular opinion 
>> on the question under discussion.)
> 
> 
> I guess its a dead horse.  Sorry for beating this drum again.  I truly 
> thought that some core bugzilla dev might be willing to engage in the 
> semantic conversation and that it might lead to some enlightening 
> conclusions.  C'est la vie.  I'll go crawl back in my hole until we've 
> got something to show that people might be interested in playing with. 
> Actually we should have a mailing list going this week to start 
> discussing goals and design ideas.  I'll post when it's working.

Chris, if you feel so inclined - fork this project (or create "module" 
addons - that could just be diffs). The whole thing could be a perl 
wrapper around "patch". And I think that you could feel free to post 
those to this list.

> 
> Thanks for all the folks who have sent me private notes of support in 
> this process.  And particular thanks and apologies to the bugzilla 
> developers I've annoyed in trying to get task management implemented in 
> bugzilla.
> 

I haven't been annoyed myself (I found it rather intriguing even though 
I wouldn't use it).

Why not open a project on sf.net bugzilla-task-management or something. 
I'm sure you could find people interested in this. Hell, I'd even 
volunteer to set this up and help develop something like this (even 
though I probably wouldn't use it). Send me a message about who is 
interested. I'm sure Dave would be willing to even link to the project 
from www.bugzilla.org if it actually becomes usable.

Hell, it could even be something more general like: bugzilla-addons with 
un-approved addons for bugzilla (addons that don't follow the design 
goals of bugzilla).

Just my 2 cents.

- Mick

(o> Web / software developer
( )     UNIX Systems Admin
---   ~ www.mickweiss.com ~