What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Christopher Hicks]

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Mick Weiss wrote:
> Christopher Hicks wrote:
>> 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

Feel free to program in PHP if you like.  I think you're making a mistake 
for various OT reasons, but I've posted about this enough to thoroughly 
tork Rasmus on a few occassions so it shouldn't too hard to find.  If you 
want to discuss this with me off list, send me a direct note.  Try 
Apache::ASP though.  It's my nicorette for PHP addicts.

> 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.

I'm trying very hard to avoid forking anything.  I'd like to include some 
patches (like custom fields) that haven't gotten much exposure and that 
have had people begging for it for years, but I'm prepared to deal with 
whatever the migration issues are when the bugzilla core folks sanctify a 
custom fields patch of their own.

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

Given that the target audience for this thread has been utterly silent on 
the prime topic of the thread I'm guessing I've annoyed some folks beyond 
caring about what I'm saying.

> Why not open a project on sf.net bugzilla-task-management or something.

I've played with running a sourceforge project and it was severely 
lacking.  For one thing, I want to use svn instead of cvs.  But when you 
get right down to it a lot of what I'm looking at doing is creating 
something that's going to compete with sourceforge.  And I fully intend to 
eat my own dogfood throughout this process.  I have servers.  I have 
bandwidth.  I just want some better tools to deal with an increasingly 
workload.  Bugzilla runs my life in some senses and I'd like to spend less 
time on overhead and more time on doing what people are asking for.

> I'm sure you could find people interested in this.

There are a couple so far.  Previous times this topic has come up there 
was no interest whatsoever, so two folks is sounding much better than 
squeezing out all the time myself.

> 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.

We're setting up a mailing list next, and then a wiki, and soon after a 
dedicated server for folks that want to work on the project.  I haven't 
asked anyone who's privately emailed me if sharing their names is OK, so 
I'm going to leave that to them in their own good time.

> I'm sure Dave would be willing to even link to the project from 
> www.bugzilla.org if it actually becomes usable.

I'd love to get it to the point that it would be a relevant question.

> 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).

That's the gist of the idea.

> Just my 2 cents.

Thanks for responding.

-- 
</chris>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare