Customizability vs. Shipping a Good Product

[Myk Melez]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> I see you are more looking at our bloated Parameters section here 
> rather than User Preferences. And I agree, it has many of the same 
> problems. E.g.:
>
> docs_urlbase: would it really have hurt us to always make the docs 
> available at <url_base>/docs?
I somewhat agree, except that I take a Firefox view of things, where we 
expose a small set of preferences to regular users but make a much 
broader set of preferences available to power users (and never use 
preferences as an excuse not to make hard decisions about the default 
out-of-the-box experience).

I think that's the right model for Bugzilla too, and that most if not 
all of the questionable preferences have their place in the application, 
but we should distinguish between those we place front-and-center on 
Preference and Parameter pages and those we hide in alternate UIs 
(which, for administrators, could be simply direct access to the 
localconfig file and the MySQL prefs table).

-myk