On 4/11/07, Christopher Blizzard <blizzard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A little pontificating, sorry: Over time I've become less and less of a fan of bugzilla. Mostly because people see it as a hammer for all their nails: bug fixing, task assignment, customer defect resolution and even release management. I think that other than "here's the issues that as a developer I know I need to fix" it does a crappy job.
Agree. In particular, bugzilla flags are the most horrible kludge in the history of UI kludges. And even for developers, it is only a least-bad option, like democracy or capitalism.
connecting defects to source control and letting fixes flow between projects is important. But no one has taken that first step to say "we're going to go out and try to make this happen."
Well, Canonical has. I think their execution has been poor, but they have had the right vision for several years now.
Should it be us? Does Red Hat want to fund it? (Based on the history of ownership of both our internal and external tools, the answer is probably no.) Can we organize a community around solving that problem? It's hard, since everyone has their own vision of what it should be, and very often it's "bugzilla, with even more stuff on top!" And things don't really move. It's hard to know what the next step is. But I would love to hear more ideas.
My random-ass-guess? If you want traction, talk to the kernel people. They have achieved agreement on an RCS, and appear to be reaching a consensus that bug tracking is important (I hear talk that they are hiring a bugmaster.) Tying bug tracking into git (git bisect-submit!) is an obvious next step for them, and bugzilla is even more completely broken for them than it is for anyone else. No other big community has made the full jump to a modern distributed RCS yet; my sense is that this is a prereq for modern bugtracking. So start there. (I think GNOME would be happy to switch away from bugzilla to something distributed, but has ~ 0 manpower to write the tool in the first place. You obviously know mozilla better than I do, but I'd be shocked if they are ready to move away from bugzilla- too tied into it.) Luis _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
