UI Changes

[David Miller]

We all agreed a while back that we were going to let Kiko give Bugzilla 
a UI overhaul (making it more friendly to use, etc), with his only 
roadblock being to get it past myself and Myk.

Kiko has a few people employed for him currently who he's got working on 
this, and it's of course slowing them down to wait for approvals that 
lately are coming with lots of negative reviews (which may not be a bad 
thing, but more on that later).

Kiko insists that some of the later work will build on the earlier 
patches and when it's all done, it'll look beautiful, even if a lot of 
the in-between steps wind up making it worse short-term.  That said, if 
that actually turns out to be the case, it would make it a lot easier 
for approvals to be able to see the final product first.

We're also less than a week away from freezing for 2.20, which means 
landing potentially ugly intermediate steps now is probably a bad thing.

What I'm going to do is give Kiko a branch to play on, with a few 
conditions on it.  We successfully used a branch for the group system 
rewrite, and although it is in smaller pieces, this is a similar 
magnitude change, so we ought to be able to make it work.

The conditions:

1) I'll set up an install on landfill that pulls his branch regularly so 
we can all visit and see how it's working.

2) Separate patches for each change still need to be maintained.  He can 
indicate on the status whiteboard if he's checked it in on the branch. 
This is so that each change can still be individually reviewed as it 
goes in when we pull them back to the trunk, but this way we'll have a 
better idea what the final product will be when we get to that point, 
and changes can still be made.

3) The branch will need to be synced with the trunk regularly so the 
effects of new stuff on the trunk can be taken into account.

4) We are under no obligation to take anything to the trunk.  But if it 
all turns out the way it's advertised, hopefully we'll want to :)  The 
patches can be reviewed and pulled to the trunk piecemeal as we get time 
after we branch for 2.20, and things that look ugly, but "there's 
additional patches coming that'll make it much better" we can wait until 
those additional patches are available so we can see if that's really 
the case, and then take them all at once when it's pretty.

-- 
Dave Miller      Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System
http://www.justdave.net/             http://www.bugzilla.org/