Custom fields schema

[Steven Suson]

    I have to agree whole heartedly with this. It seems every time that 
a discussion of custom fields begins, that it deteriorates into a flame 
war... And each and every time, the proposed contributor is nit picked 
to death, until the custom fields discussion dies away. Come on guys! 
MANY bugzilla users have wanted custom fields for several years now 
(including my company and I); remember that best is the enemy of good 
enough.

    Granted I'm not a relational purist, but having a seperate table for 
each custom field seems quite excessive. Perhaps it gives us better 
normalization, but at what cost? I back Sean on this one!

Steven Suson

Shane H. W. Travis wrote:

>On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Myk Melez wrote:
>
>  
>
>>While weighing Sean's success with FAD at his installation, we should
>>also weigh the success of FAC on hundreds of Bugzilla installations for
>>a number of years, both for standard fields and for custom ones, not to
>>mention the general success of FAC in database design.
>>    
>>
>
>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?
>
>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. Way to foster major
>contributions! Funny thing is that it's good enough to hold 187 custom
>fields at his site... but that's not good enough for us (or, more
>specifically, for Myk).
>
>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. There are benefits
>and trade-offs to each method. Each one has its proponents and its
>detractors, and this discussion is rapidly taking on some characteristics of
>a Religious Flame War.
>
>Working code (and dedicated developers) trumps beautiful theories nine times
>out of ten, in my books.
>
>Shane H.W. Travis       | The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing
>travis at sedsystems.ca    |  because you can only do a little.
>Saskatoon, Saskatchewan |   Do what you can.  -- Sydney Smith
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