Custom fields schema

[Myk Melez]

Shane H. W. Travis wrote:

>Something else to weigh: Are any of those 'hundreds of installations' (where
>do you get this figure from anyway?) making any effort to improve Bugzilla
>by re-committing their code? Do they have a developer who is willing to
>commit to the multiple re-writes and constant criticism that's going to be
>necessary to get a patch of this size and magnitude landed on the trunk?
>  
>
"Hundreds of installations" refers to both custom fields and standard 
ones.  And I don't know about other developers, but I'm willing to 
commit to those rewrites and criticism of my code.

>AIUI, Sean has already had to develop this locally -- because his bosses
>told him to. He is now trying to make the results of his efforts available
>to Bugzilla, because it's something that people have been griping about
>wanting done for the last five years... and he's basically being told to go
>piss up a rope because his design isn't good enough.
>
No one has told Sean to "piss up a rope" or anything like it, nor has 
anyone complained about the vast majority of the work he's done.  That's 
a gross mischaracterization of the tenor of the debate.

As far as I know I'm the only one who has criticized Sean's work to any 
significant degree, and I have merely stated that the database design is 
significantly suboptimal and that we should be employing a different 
design for this feature.  That's a reasonable opinion to state and discuss.

>If one of FAC/FAD were a complete abomination, and implementing it that way
>would be universally looked back on as a horrendous mistake... then
>absolutely I agree that the code shouldn't be taken just for the sake of
>having it...  but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
>
I think if we implement FAD we will regret it.

>Working code (and dedicated developers) trumps beautiful theories nine times
>out of ten, in my books.
>  
>
This is the tenth time, when the ramifications of a feature with as 
significant an impact on the codebase warrant getting it as right as 
possible the first time.  Nonetheless, I've posted the first version of 
a FAC-based custom fields implementation to the bug, so there's working 
code for developers to compare on both sides of the debate now.

-myk