backporting minor UI changes to keep QA scripts working

[David Miller]

The QA guys are wanting to backport a bunch of minor UI changes from
2.22 to 2.20 to make it easier to share Selenium (UI testing) scripts
between the two versions.  There's some good reasons for this:

1) It's really hard to maintain separate copies of the scripts for each
version of Bugzilla, and remembering to make the same changes to each
script when you fix a problem with them.

2) Running the same script makes it easier to detect regressions from
one version to the next.

3) Lots of time savings for QA people, mostly because of #1

However, I don't really like the idea, but I figured I'd get a little
bit of discussion on it before I outright say no.

Here's my reasons:

1) Most of the time when we make UI changes on a stable branch a
localizer has to match the change on their localization pack. (but it's
been pointed out to me that we've already done this before for missing
whitespace and so forth)

2) It's a slippery slope to go down.  Bugzilla is continually evolving,
and this problem isn't going to go away.  The same problem will happen
again with 2.24 because of UI changes.  Features are going to change,
too.  Every version is going to break scripts that we used with the
previous version...  How many branches do we continue to backport UI
changes to?

Anyone have thoughts on the matter, in either direction?

As much as I want to make life easy for the QA guys (they've been doing
an awesome job, and I really don't want them to stop or get burned out
on it) I'm leaning very heavily on the No side, so it'll take some
convincing.

-- 
Dave Miller                                   http://www.justdave.net/
System Administrator, Mozilla Corporation      http://www.mozilla.com/
Project Leader, Bugzilla Bug Tracking System  http://www.bugzilla.org/