What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Christopher Hicks]

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Joel Peshkin wrote:
> Actually, it would be best to start by identifying the places where 
> adding new hooks to Bugzilla makes it easier to tie in functionality 
> that the standard Bugzilla does not want.

A clean interface for creating/updating bugs including comments and time 
would be the main thing.  I know work has been done on improving the 
bugzilla API's from the mailing list murmerings, but I haven't played with 
it myself so I'm not sure what it's got and doesn't until somebody digs 
into it.

> The addition of templates, modular authentication, template hooks, 
> template plugins, etc... all move the underlying Bugzilla project in a 
> direction that makes it easier to do this sort of thing.

I'm not particularly worried about authentication.  There are plenty of 
generic frameworks for that.  Using PAM provides fully modular 
authentication.  I don't currently see that any templates would need to be 
added to BZ, but I would like to extend the easy-CSSification work once 
that's ready to fly (is that in yet?) to all of the different intergrated 
components to minimize the number of places that things need to change for 
localizing the look and feel.

> Aside from a few custom fields and some template changes, I suspect that 
> one of the major things needed for work items is to have a stronger 
> sense of workflow.  This is something that is useful to the core 
> Bugzilla project as well.

This is something that we've batted around a little bit, but it's not a 
goal for the first release.  I agree that something like this would be 
good for bugzilla and this other bugzilla-based thing.  I desperately need 
a name for this other thing, but my cold has strangled my creative neurons 
this week so nothing good has popped out yet.  I'm tired of talking about 
it in non-named terms though.  Blerg.

> Let's look for the common parts before focussing in the parts that diverge.

Absolutely.

-- 
</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