quoting, tasks, semantics

[Christopher Hicks]

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Christopher Hicks wrote:
>> Yes, but think about a BZ comment that had 20 different minor tweaks that 
>> needed to be made to the software. 
>
> My reaction to that, if each point was separate, would be to trout the user 
> for putting too many issues in the same bug :-)

I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.

The examples that come to mind are cases where we have a bug to write a 
simple web application.  Naturally people don't know what they want until 
they get what they've already asked for, so there end up being a slew of 
tweaks.  Since I'm getting paid to do this I don't really care how many 
tweaks they come up with.  From a semantic perspective you might consider 
the tweaks to be bugs in and of themselves, but to me tweaks are to bugs 
as threads are to processes.  In other words, tweaks and tasks are like 
bugs, but they're light weight and they don't require as much overhead. 
Practically speaking, expecting folks to make a new bug for every tweak 
would be ridiculous and a significant overhead for the bug reporter and 
the developer.

It would be nice if bugzilla supported tasks within bugs and this is 
something we discussed on the mailing list some time ago.  (Given my 
experience trying to get a simple patch accepted I decided not to take on 
something as big as adding tasks within bugzilla.  I still plan to get 
back to the longdescs primary key issue one of these days.)  So I've 
settled on integrating some web groupware into bugzilla, but I'm not sure 
which yet.  Dicole is the front runner currently.

In the mean time, being able to reply to tweak lists using the reply 
feature and keeping a running list of things to do in the bug comments 
gets me by.

-- 
</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