The Problems of Perl: The Future of Bugzilla

[Aaron Trevena]

On 15/05/07, Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:
> Thank you for your apology.

In the words of Sir Lancelot :
"Sorry.  Sorry!  You see what I mean, I just get carried away, I'm
really most awfully sorry.  Sorry!  Sorry, everyone...." :)

> I think it would be really, really cool if some of the gurus in the Perl
> world were to spend some time looking at Bugzilla and making
> constructive suggestions, in bang-for-buck order, about what we might
> change about our code or our processes to make live easier for
> developers or users. Yes, it would take some time - at least a few hours
> for each person - but it would be a wonderful service that the Perl
> community could perform to benefit (indirectly) the free software
> community as a whole.

and moving on..

"Please!  This is supposed to be a...*happy* occasion!  Let's not
*bicker* and *argue* about 'oo killed 'oo!" [1]

> Aaron, if you have the contacts and could arrange something like this,
> perhaps on a Saturday afternoon one weekend with all the people in an
> IRC channel (so the Bugzilla developers can answer the Perl gurus'
> questions)...

I think I have the contacts although I think a couple of the bugzilla
people have burnt some bridges with some of the trolling on the wiki..
Randal was only half joking when he said  ""We'd actually prefer you
stop using Perl. You seem to be giving it a bad name. KTHX, Bye".

Fortunately there are few people who seem to be interested in sorting
out bugzilla, for the same reason as a cabal created the NMS
replacement for MSA, MSA was giving perl a bad name and teaching
newbies very bad practice, on top of being utterly insecure. Bugzilla
is nowhere near that bad - and the inclusion of TT, Email::* and (as I
only noticed the other day) a bunch of actual Test::Harness tests in
t/, is a pretty good sign of things moving forwards.

I'll ask around, and I still say that (optional) pagination could be
very useful - I used find-in-page for a long list in one of my own
applications today and it's really rather better to paginate results
and provide a way of further restricting those results.

Something that Bugzilla could do for the perl community is to work
together to find the best solution for packaging CPAN modules into a
standalone application - the catalyst people have been working hard on
making CPAN dependancies less of an obstacle for installation, and PAR
could certainly be a solution for Bugzilla.

Cheers,

Aaron

1] http://www.intriguing.com/mp/_pictures/grail/large/HolyGrail136.jpg

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