Bugzilla: Philosophy

[Guy Pyrzak]

Well i guess my question/rant were about "why do we need a philosophy?". The
answer I came up with was "to figure out what goes is core to Bugzilla
development and what is an extension" or "to figure out what core developers
should work on next". Is that the reason why we need a philosophy? Stating a
philosophy with out an actual use is fine, in which case done. But I'm more
interested in the application of the philosophy. For example...

- If someone wrote code that adds an integrated debugger into Bugzilla, core
or extension?
- If someone wrote code to encourage test driven development, core or an
extension?
- If someone wrote code to support syntax highlighting on patches, core or
an extension?
- If someone wrote code to integrate a wiki into bugzilla, core or
extension?
- If someone wrote code to show images inline with comments.. core or
extension?
- If someone wrote code that adds the "Getting Bugs Done" methodology...
core or extension?
- Do we add feature X or do we improve usability of feature Y?

These are the sorts of questions that I'd like to see the philosophy attempt
to answer. A bug tracker by its very nature "helps people fix bugs in
software", but so do a bunch of other tools. So I'd like to see a philosophy
that helps define a purpose beyond the fuzzy area of "fix bugs in software",
I think we should and can be more specific.

As someone who has hacked Bugzilla in more ways than I care to describe, I
wan to know which of my hacks I can think about giving back to Bugzilla and
which are extensions.

-Guy

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Michael Thomas <mockodin at gmail.com> wrote:

> We seem to be trying to define exactly what bugzilla is or does. Is it
> a bug tracker, is it a development tool, is it etc..
>
> It would seem to me that it is a open ended collection tool at the
> core. That is what it does right? Collect a bug report and record
> comments pertaining to. Sure it also categorizes, prioritizes, files,
> sorts... Sure it does more. But it could operate at that level at its
> most basic. Everything else is add-on.The word "Bug" could be swapped
> out with issue, or any number of other words or phrases to identify a
> single or group of individuals needs.
>
> The extension system that has been/is being implemented makes this
> feel more apparent. It can now or has, the potential to integrate with
> hundreds of third party applications and systems. That means it can
> serve any numbers of roles or even all of them with the same instance.
> While preventing scope creep is all well an good I would not want to
> start outright tossing or discouraging someones ideas because it
> didn't meet a specific ideal. Make it an extension. Perhaps provide a
> area to submit extensions for general consumption? Other than the
> core.
>
> Unless the goal is the become Microsoft...
>
> Gerv's "To help people fix bugs in software." I think meets that the
> best, it does not define how it helps, merely that the ability is
> there.
>
> /end comment on only a small part of the overall "Philosophy" conversation
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