Distributed Bug Tracking

[Zach Lipton]

On May 20, 2008, at 2:53 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Guy Pyrzak wrote:
>> Google Gears (http://gears.google.com/) + Bugzilla.... need i say  
>> more?
>
> Well yeah :-) If we were going to do an offline HTML app version of  
> Bugzilla, we'd do it using the new WHAT-WG offline stuff supported  
> in Firefox 3. Right? :-)
>
Of course! I actually spent some time the other day playing around  
with what an offline version of Bugzilla would look like, using the  
WHATWG application cache and app storage objects in Firefox 3.  
Currently, it's blocked by the lack of support in Firefox for fallback  
cache entries (they were added to the spec after the feature freeze),  
which means that we can't yet handle offline requests for pages with  
query strings (e.g. show_bug.cgi?id=5 is considered a completely  
separate page from show_bug.cgi?id=6). Dave Camp tells me that this  
will get fixed in nightlies sooner rather than later, and once that  
happens I will certainly post a proof of concept up on landfill for  
everyone to play with.

Besides this one issue, it actually turns out to be pretty simple to  
allow for offline storage/editing of bugs, particularly since we  
already have the collision detection code to help with  
synchronization. Obviously, we can't implement everything offline, but  
we can certainly cache bug data and allow users to save a query's  
worth of bugs for later offline use and permit editing, with the  
results later sync'd back to the server. Not sure, however, if  
uploading is feasible without a Firefox-only hack, as the security  
model is obviously rather strict about filesystem access. On the other  
hand, you can't generate a cvs diff offline anyway, so I'm not sure if  
uploading is really that useful.

--zach