Bugzilla: Philosophy

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 03/01/2010 07:47 AM, Guy Pyrzak wrote:
> But I think you're right Gerv, the "philosophy" is more about
> maintaining and narrowing scopes and features than "philosophy".

	Just for clarity's sake, when I say "Philosophy", I mean definition 7 here:

	http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/philosophy

> Does
> that change anything about the reality of the tool? I don't think it does.

	But this is true, too. :-)

> However, as Max would point out, we can focus on extensions once
> Bugzilla isn't so unwieldy and unfriendly.

	Sure! But I do agree with you about all the other points you made, too.

> Gerv wrote: *To help people fix bugs in software.*
> Max wrote: *To help people store and organize bug reports.*
> 
> I'm not sure either are great, however, Gerv your statement could also
> be applied to an IDE, which are actually used to "help people fix bugs
> in software" in fact if that was Bugzilla's philosophy then we'd need to
> add a debugger,[snip]

	That was my thought too. I did actually have a thought about how to
integrate them, I'm just not too certain that it's right, yet.

	Perhaps:

	The purpose of Bugzilla is to help people store and organize bug
reports so that they can be addressed.

> To be clear to Gerv, I like your philosophy, but it doesn't fulfill the
> main purpose of stating this philosophy. So I'll state the
> reason/rationale for stating the philosophy....
> 
> *To avoid scope creep and feature enhancements on a product (Bugzilla)
> which is already unwieldy and not user friendly by many accounts*.

	Pretty much. If you want to know a bit more about my thoughts on it:

	http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/the-purpose-of-software/
	http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/specific-solutions/
	http://www.codesimplicity.com/post/features-simplicity-and-the-purpose-of-software/
	

> So maybe the Bugzilla philosophy for now could be:
> *To not add any big new features that don't serve the purpose of
> simplifying and easing the use of existing features in Bugzilla.*

	:-) That's pretty much been my personal focus lately on the project.
That does seem like our short-term goal at the moment.

	-Max
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