Bugzilla @ MySQL Conference - booth report

[Gervase Markham]

Myk Melez wrote:
>    2. My organization needs a bug tracking system, and I've heard about
>       Bugzilla.  Tell me more about it. (~12 folks)

Do you feel that you had sufficient marketing collateral to inform them? ;-)

>    3. We use Trac or something else instead of Bugzilla because Bugzilla
>       is not written in PHP,

A legitimate point if all their engineers know PHP and they plan to
customise their BTS. However, I assert that there's no point in
attempting to win the business of such a customer. We won't get 100% of
the market - but we aren't a monopolist, so we don't need to.

> its user interface sucks, 

I know it's a small sample size, but did you ask if this was a recent
viewpoint, or one they had got a few years ago?

> or I couldn't get
>       it installed. (~6 folks)

On the support list, I've been noticing most of the installation
questions come from Windows users. Do other people sense that too?

> I'm not sure it was worth the time spent, however.  I suspect that the
> time I spent manning the booth would have been better spent doing
> reviews or the like.

You may be right. I'm not sure the Bugzilla project gains overall by
having its developers spend time on outreach. We won't grow the
community sufficiently to offset the lost time and, even if it does
grow, the lead time on those new members becoming helpful developers
would be long.

Gerv