quoting, tasks, semantics

[Gervase Markham]

Christopher Hicks wrote:
> I understand that it may seem odd to have one bug for an "entire" web 
> application, but in the minds of the people paying the money (who get 
> bills that show time applied to specific bugs) and to me this small web 
> application was "one thing to do", so logically it should mostly be in 
> one bug.

So how about a tracking bug as the "one bug"? I'm sure they'd understand 
that you need to break a task down into more manageable pieces...

> [ Would it be wrong for me to point out that you seem to be following 
> Joel's bad example of influencing behavior through software design? ]

I actually think it's perfectly reasonable to influence behaviour 
through software design - but perhaps that's another debate. (For 
example, newsreaders default to putting the user's cursor at the top of 
a reply to try and prevent them adding "Me too!" to the bottom of 300 
lines of quoting.)

Anyway, I still think we don't want to try and implement "sub-bugs" in 
Bugzilla. Because we'll end up with a situation where people want 
different statuses for the sub-bugs, and other sub-bug specific fields, 
until you end up almost re-inventing bugs and meta-bugs, just down one 
level.

IMO, the bug should remain the individual unit. If it's too heavyweight 
for a particular use, the interface can be customised to remove many of 
the fields. You can track a group of connected bugs using the dependency 
tree view.

Gerv