What are bugs? Are bugs really work items?

[Gervase Markham]

Christopher Hicks wrote:
> But would we have had firefox if people hadn't piled features onto 
> mozilla to the point that it needed to split up?  

In this analogy, Bugzilla is Mozilla. I think most of the developers 
would prefer not to see Bugzilla get into such a bloated state that 
people wanted to do a slimmer rewrite...

Turn it around. If people hadn't piled features into Mozilla in that 
way, we wouldn't necessarily have needed Firefox.

> I think Mozilla is one 
> of the better examples of shoving tons of different pieces into the pot, 
> not particularly fearing feature creep, and letting folks take as big 
> (or small) a bowl of soup as you want.

I cannot believe you are using the way Mozilla developed as an example 
to follow! :-) And the browser in the Mozilla Suite is a single-size 
bowl of soup anyway.

>>     Linux follows the Unix Philosophy most definitely, where all the 
>> different parts of the kernel can be modularized and are written 
>> mostly separately. (Though it is a monolithic kernel, so it does give 
>> some credit to your theory.)
> 
> When I said Linux I was referring to the kernel.

The fact that it's a monolithic kernel isn't really relevant. The kernel 
is still very carefully modularised. The fact that the modules are 
linked into one big binary and communicate via shared memory rather than 
being a lot of services communicating via message passing is orthogonal 
to the level of code modularity.

Gerv