Fwd: REST APIs, and Tags

[Benjamin Smedberg]

On 11/26/09 9:19 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:

> It would be great to start a discussion on our future plans for this
> sort of thing. For example, can we merge keywords and what we now call
> tags into one tag implementation (incorporating both public and private
> tags) which has these desirable properties?

I was just made aware of this thread, and wanted to post my thoughts and 
experiences from using the google code bugtracker.

The google code bug tracker tracks basically all metadata using "labels". 
The project administrator can administer a predefined set of labels, and 
also any project member (roughly equivalent to editbugs in 
bugzilla.mozilla.org) can label bugs with other values if they wish.

Labels are not simple text tags, then can have two-part values, for example:

Type-Defect
Type-Enhancement
Type-Task

Priority-Critical
Priority-High

Milestone-1
Milestone-2.3.3

The project administrator may specify that you may only have one label of 
Type-* Priority-* or Milestone-*

In search results, you can sort bugs by the labels.

I tend to think that if bugzilla.mozilla.org had these types of labels, we 
would use them for almost every field: replace 
OS/priority/keywords/version/platform/importance/severity/TM/all the 
flags/all the multi-state flags, and use predefined labels for all of this 
metadata. We might even decide to get rid of component and use labels for 
that as well.

Currently google code doesn't have really fine-grained controls to control 
labels so that "any user can set blocking1.9.2-nominated" but "only a 
special group can set blocking-1.9.2-alpha", but that's mainly because they 
don't have access control groups at all.

The remaining question, then, is how to manage 'unadministrated' labels. As 
this thread shows, there are two different categories:

* allow "normal" users to publicly organize bugs. I think that at 
bugzilla.mozilla.org at least, we'd want to restrict the organization of 
some labels (the core ones) to project administrators (perhaps whoever has 
editkeywords now). But anyone with editbugs would be able to create their 
own taxonomy, for example I'd like to create a multi-state label:

Lorentz-nominated
Lorentz-notblocking
Lorentz-blockingalpha
Lorentz-blockingbeta

* allow users to privately organize bugs. There are two possible reasons for 
this:

1) the user wants to keep the labels secret
2) the user doesn't want to burden everyone's UI with their own private 
annotations.

Frankly #1 doesn't seem that important. I wonder if, in the UI, we could 
just allow each user to claim labelspace based on some username/loginname, 
e.g. I could claim bsmedberg-* labelspace as my personal area, and those 
labels 1) wouldn't appear in the UI by default 2) only I could set those labels.

--BDS
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