The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla

[Gervase Markham]

Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
> And, in fact, I wonder why you are considering a rewrite: Why not
> simply pushing Scarab? IMO, it was created out of rather similar
> considerations?

IMO (tangentially relevant), Scarab is a poster child for why "let's 
rewrite this product to use these cool new technologies which will make 
everything better and faster and quicker and sexier and, and, and..." is 
a bad idea. (Yes, I exaggerate for effect.) At the time, the cool new 
thing was Java Servlets. Their original feature list[0] basically boiled 
down to "like Bugzilla, but in Java".

It went into "beta" in early 2002. That's 5 years ago. If there's any 
product which has got lost in what the Loginataka[1] refers to as "the 
ghastly limbo called Perpetual Beta", it's Scarab.

<checks> In February of this year, they seem to have removed the "beta" 
designation, and gone from 1.0-beta20 to "0.21". And the front page 
calls it "stable". <shrug>

Admittedly, my judgment may be coloured by one of its lead developers 
walking into our newsgroup a few years ago and demanding in rather rude 
terms that we buck our ideas up and fix Bugzilla to make it easier for 
him to migrate lots of people to his tool. But I try not to let it be so.

Gerv

[0] 
http://web.archive.org/web/20020225155214/http://scarab.tigris.org/index.html
[1] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/loginataka.html