Custom Fields Development (was Re: On Tuesday 28 February 2006

[Myk Melez]

Benton, Kevin wrote:
> IIRC, the discussion (albeit heated at times) wasn't whether or not to
> implement custom fields, but rather how to implement them.
Right.  Both sides in the debate (fields-as-columns, a.k.a. FAC, and 
fields-as-data, a.k.a. FAD) agreed on the outcome (that Bugzilla should 
have custom fields with a certain feature set); we just disagreed on the 
approach.  Areas of contention included performance (with both sides 
claiming significantly better performance for their approach), how best 
to integrate with the Bugzilla code infrastructure, and what the 
database schema should look like.

In the end, Dave didn't choose sides, and development stalled, although 
patches were available for both approaches (my basic implementation for 
FAC and a complete but large and infrastructure-modifying implementation 
for FAD).  Then Max revived development with a proposal to incrementally 
develop the feature, and he filed bugs on each discrete implementation task.

Meanwhile, I believe FAD's primary developer lost his Bugzilla 
development job (I'm not positive about this, as my mail server won't 
let me get to my personal list archive, and getting the list archive 
from majordomo is hard) and was no longer available to work on the FAD 
approach.  I then modified my basic FAC implementation to implement the 
first few of Max's bugs and took it through the review process.  
Recently it got checked in when the trunk reopened for 2.24 development, 
and here we are.

-myk