Bugzilla's Future. Much of this is the present, now. |
Bugzilla's future is a constantly-changing thing, as various developers - "scratch an itch" when it comes to functionality. - Thus this section is very malleable, subject to change without notice, etc. - You'll probably also notice the lack of formatting. I apologize that it's - not quite as readable as the rest of the Guide. -
- Bugzilla Blue Sky
-
-Customisability
-
- One of the major stumbling blocks of Bugzilla has been that it is too
- rigid and does not adapt itself well enough to the needs of an
- organisation. This has led to organisations making changes to the
- Bugzilla code that need to be redone each new version of Bugzilla.
- Bugzilla should attempt to move away from this to a world where this
- doesn't need to occur.
-
- Most of the subsections in this section are currently explicit design
- goals for the "Bugzilla 3" rewrite. This does not necessarily mean
- that they will not occur before them in Bugzilla 2, but most are
- significant undertakings.
-
- Field Customisation
-
- Many installations wish to customise the fields that appear on bug
- reports. Current versions of Bugzilla offer limited
- customisability. In particular, some fields can be turned off.
-
- However, many administrators wish to add their own fields, and rename
- or otherwise modify existing fields. An architecture that supports
- this would be extraordinarily useful.
-
- Indeed, many fields work similarly and could be abstracted into "field
- types", so that an administrator need write little or no code to
- support the new fields they desire.
-
- Possible field types include text (eg status whiteboard), numbers,
- dates (eg report time), accounts (eg reporter, qa, cc), inter-bug
- relationships (dependencies, duplicates), option groups (platform, os,
- severity, priority, target milestone, version) etc.
-
- Ideally an administrator could configure their fields through a
- Bugzilla interface that requires no code to be added. However, it is
- highly unlikely this ideal will never be met, and in a similar way
- that office applications have scripting languages, Bugzilla should
- allow new field types to be written.
-
- Similarly, a common desire is for resolutions to be added or removed.
-
- Allocations
-
- ?
-
- Option Groups
-
- ?
-
- Relations
-
- ?
-
- Database Integrity
-
- Furthermore, it is desirable for administrators to be able to specify
- rules that must or should apply between the fields on a bug report.
-
- For example, you might wish to specify that a bug with status ASSIGNED
- must have a target milestone field that that is not untargetted. Or
- that a bug with a certain number of votes should get ASSIGNED. Or
- that the QA contact must be different from the assignee.
-
- "Must" relationships could be implemented by refusing to make changes
- that violate the relationships, or alternatively, automatically
- updating certain fields in order to satisfy the criteria. Which
- occurs should be up to the administrator.
-
- "Should" relationships could be implemented by a combination of
- emitting warnings on the process bug page, the same on notification
- mails, or emitting periodic whine mails about the situation. Again,
- which occurs should be up to the administrator.
-
- It should also be possible for whine mails to be emitted for "must"
- relationships, as they might become violated through direct database
- access, Bugzilla bugs, or because they were there before the
- relationship was enforced.
-
- As well as implementing intra-bug constraints, it would be useful to
- create inter-bug constraints. For example, a bug that is dependent on
- another bug should not have an earlier milestone or greater priority
- than that bug.
-
- Database Adaptability
-
- Often an administrator desires that fields adapt to the values of
- other fields. For example, the value of a field might determine the
- possible values of another field or even whether it appears (whether
- it is "applicable").
-
- Limited adaptability is present in Bugzilla 2, and only on the
- "Product" field:
- * The possible values of the target milestone, version and component
- fields depend on the product.
- * UNCONFIRMED can be turned off for specific products.
- * Voting can be configured differently or turned off for different
- products, and there is a separate user vote limits for each
- product.
-
- It would be good if more adaptability was present, both in terms of
- all fields relying on the product, as well as the ability to adapt
- based on the value of all fields.
-
- Example ???
-
- General adaptability raises the issue of circular references between
- fields causing problems. One possible solution to this is to place
- the fields in a total ordering and require a field refer only to the
- previous fields.
-
- In Bugzilla 2, changing the product of a bug meant a second page would
- appear that allowed you to choose a new milestone, component and
- version, as those fields adapted themselves to the new product. This
- page could be generalised to support all instances where:
- * a field value must or might be changed because the possible values
- have changed
- * is going to drop off because it it is no longer applicable, and
- this should be confirmed
- * must be specified because it is suddenly applicable, and the
- default value, if one exists, might not be acceptable
-
- Database Independence
-
- Currently Bugzilla only runs on the MySQL database. It would be
- desirable for Bugzilla to run on other databases, because:
- * Organisations may have existing database products they use and
- would prefer to run a homogenous environment.
- * Databases each have their own shortcomings, including MySQL. An
- administrator might choose a database that would work better with
- their Bugzilla.
-
- This raises the possibility that we could use features that are only
- present in some databases, by appropriately falling back. For
- example, in the MySQL world, we live without:
- * record-level locking, instead we use table-level locking
- * referential and record constraints, instead we checking code
- * subselects, instead we use multiple queries and redundant "caches"
-
- Multiple Front Ends
-
- Currently Bugzilla is manipulated via the Web, and notifies via
- E-Mail. It would be desirable for Bugzilla to easily support various
- front ends.
-
- There is no reason that Bugzilla could not be controlled via a whole
- range of front ends, including Web, E-Mail, IRC, ICQ, etc, and
- similarly for how it notifies. It's also possible that we could
- introduce a special Bugzilla client that uses its own protocol, for
- maximum user productivity.
-
- Indeed a request reply might be returned via a totally different
- transport method than was use to submit the request.
-
-Internationalisation
-
- Bugzilla currently supports only English. All of the field names,
- user instructions, etc are written in English. It would be desirable
- to allow "language packs" so Bugzilla can be easily used in
- non-English speaking locales.
-
- To a degree field customisation supports this, because administrators
- could specify their own fields names anyway. However, there will
- always be some basic facilities not covered by this, and it is
- desirable that the administrator's interface also is
- internationalisable.
-
-Better Searching
-
- General Summary Reports
-
- Sometimes, the normal querying page leaves a lot to be desired. There
- are other facilities already in place or which people have asked for:
-
- Most Doomed Reports - All Bugs or All Bugs In A Product, Categorised
- On Assignee, Shows and Counts Number of Bugs For Each Assignee
- Most Voted For Bugs - All Bugs, Categorised On Product, Shows Top Ten
- Bugs Voters Most Want Fixed
- Number of Open Bugs For An Assignee - Bug List, Categorised On
- Developers, Counts Number of Bugs In Category
-
- The important thing to realise is that people want categorised reports
- on all sorts of things - a general summary report.
-
- In a categorised report, you choose the subset of bugs you wish to
- operate on (similar to how you would specify a query), and then
- categorise them on one or more fields.
-
- For each category you display the count of the number of things in
- that category. You can optionally display the bugs themselves, or
- leave them out, just showing the counts. And you can optionally limit
- the number of things (bugs or subcategories) that display in each
- category.
-
- Such a mechanism would let you do all of the above and more.
- Applications of this mechanism would only be recognised once it was
- implemented.
-
- Related Bugs
-
- It would be nice to have a field where you could enter other bugs
- related to the current bug. It would be handy for navigation and
- possibly even finding duplicates.
-
- Column Specification Support
-
- Currently bug lists use the columns that you last used. This doesn't
- work well for "prepackaged queries", where you followed a link. You
- can probably add a column by specifying a sort column, but this is
- difficult and suboptimal.
-
- Furthermore, I find that when I want to add a column to a bug list,
- it's usually a one off and I would prefer it to go away for the next
- query. Hence, it would be nice to specify the columns that appear on
- the bug list (and general summary report) pages. The default query
- mechanism should be able to let you specify your default columns.
-
- Advanced Querying Redesign
-
- ?
-
-Keywords
-
- People have a need to apply tags to bugs. In the beginning, people
- placed designators in the summary and status whiteboard. However,
- these fields were not designed for that, and so there were many flaws
- with this system:
- * They pollute the field with information that was never intended to
- be present.
- * Removing them with a bulk change is a difficult problem that has
- too many pitfalls to implement.
- * You can easily get the capitalisation wrong.
-
- Then dependencies were introduced (when?), and people realised that
- they could use them for "tracking bugs". Again, dependencies were not
- designed for that, and so there were more flaws, albeit different
- ones, including:
- * They aren't really bugs, so it's difficult to distinguish issues
- from bugs.
- * They can pollute bugs counts, and you must somehow exclude them
- from queries.
- * There is a whole lot of useless information on them. They have an
- assignee but there is nothing to fix, and that person can get
- whined at by Bugzilla. They have target milestones which must be
- manually maintained. And so on.
-
- Finally, keywords were introduced (when?) for this purpose to remove
- the need for these two systems. Unfortunately, the simple keywords
- implementation was itself lacking in certain features provided by the
- two previous systems, and has remained almost unchanged since its
- inception. Furthermore, it could not be forseen that in large
- installations, the sheer number of keywords could become unwieldly and
- could lead to a movement back to the other systems.
-
- The keywords system was the right idea, however, and it remains so.
- Fixing the keywords system is one of the most important Bugzilla
- issues.
-
- Bringing Keywords Up To Par
-
- For the most part, keywords are very good at what they do. It is easy
- to add and remove them (unlike summary/whiteboard designators), we can
- simply see what issues are present on a bug (unlike tracking bugs),
- and we do not confuse bugs with issues (unlike tracking bugs).
-
- However, there are still some "regressions" in the keyword system over
- previous systems:
- * Users wish to view the "dependency forest" of a keyword. While a
- dependency tree is of one bug, a dependency forest is of a bug
- list, and consists of a dependency tree for each member of the bug
- list. Users can work around this with tracking bugs by creating a
- tracking bug and viewing the dependency tree of that tracking bug.
- * Users wish to specify the keywords that initially apply to a bug,
- but instead they must edit the bug once it has already been
- submitted. They can work around this with summary designators,
- since they specify the summary at reporting time.
- * Users wish to store or share a bug list that contains a keywords
- column. Hence they wish to be able to specify what columns appear
- in the bug list URL, as mentioned earlier. They can work around
- this using summary designators, since almost all bug lists have a
- summary column.
- * Users wish to be able to view keywords on a bug list. However
- often they are only interested in a small number of keywords.
- Having a bug list with a keywords column means that all keywords
- will appear on a bug list. This can take a substantial amount of
- space where a bug has a lot of keywords, since the table columns
- in Bugzilla adjust to the largest cell in that column. Hence
- users wish to be able to specify which keywords should appear in
- the bug list. In a very real sense, each keyword is a field unto
- itself. Users can work around this by using summary designators,
- since they keywords will share the space in the summary column.
- * Users wish to know when bugs with a specific issue are resolved.
- Hence they wish to be able to receive notifications on all the
- bugs with a specific keyword. The introduction a generic watching
- facility (also for things like watching all bugs in a component)
- would achieve this. Users can work around this by using tracking
- bugs, as dependencies have an existing way of detecting fixes to
- bug a bug was blocked by.
-
- Dealing With The Keyword Overload
-
- At the time of writing, the mozilla.org installation has approximately
- 100 keywords, and many more would be in use if the keywords system
- didn't have the problems it does.
-
- Such a large number of keywords introduces logistical problems:
- * It must be easy for someone to learn what a keyword means. If a
- keyword is buried within a lot of other keywords, it can be
- difficult to find.
- * It must be easy to see what keywords are on a bug. If the number
- of keywords is large, then this can be difficult.
-
- These lead some people to feel that there are "too many keywords".
-
- These problems are not without solutions however. It is harder to
- find a list of designators or tracking bugs than it is a list of
- keywords.
-
- The essential problem is it needs to be easy to find the keywords
- we're interested in through the mass of keywords.
-
- Keyword Applicability
-
- As has been previously mentioned, it is desirable for fields to be
- able to adapt to the values of other fields. This is certainly true
- for keywords. Many keywords are simply not relevant because of the
- bugs product, component, etc.
-
- Hence, by introducing keyword applicability, and not displaying
- keywords that are not relevant to the current bug, or clearly
- separating them, we can make the keyword overload problem less
- significant.
-
- Currently when you click on "keywords" on a bug, you get a list of all
- bugs. It would be desirable to introduce a list of keywords tailored
- to a specific bug, that reports, in order:
- * the keywords currently on the bug
- * the keywords not currently on the bug, but applicable to the bug
- * optionally, the keywords not applicable to the bug
-
- This essentially orders the keywords into three groups, where each
- group is more important than the previous, and therefore appears
- closer to the top.
-
- Keyword Grouping & Ordering
-
- We could further enhance both the global and bug specific keyword list
- by grouping keywords. We should always have a "flat" view of
- keywords, but other ways of viewing the keywords would be useful too.
-
- If keyword applicability was implemented, we could group keywords
- based on their "applicability condition". Keywords that apply to all
- bugs could be separated from keywords that apply to a specific
- product, both on the global keyword list and the keyword list of a bug
- that is in that product.
-
- We could specify groups of our own. For example, many keywords are in
- a mutually exclusive group, essentially like radio buttons in a user
- interface. This creates a natural grouping, although other groupings
- occur (which depends on your keywords).
-
- It is possible that we could use collapsing/expanding operations on
- "twisties" to only should the groups we are interested in.
-
- And instead of grouping keywords, we could order them on some metric
- of usefulness, such as:
- * when the keyword was last added to a bug
- * how many bugs the keyword is on
- * how many open bugs the keyword is on
-
- Opting Out Of Keywords
-
- Not all people are going to care about all keywords. Therefore it
- makes sense that you may wish to specify which keywords you are
- interested in, either on the bug page, or on notifications.
-
- Other keywords will therefore not bother users who are not interested
- in them.
-
- Keyword Security
-
- Currently all keywords are available and editable to all people with
- edit bugs access. This situation is clearly suboptimal.
-
- Although relying on good behaviour for people to not do what they
- shouldn't works reasonably well on the mozilla.org, it is better to
- enforce that behaviour - it can be breached through malice, accident
- or ignorance.
-
- And in the situation where it is desirable for the presence or absence
- of a keyword not to be revealed, organisations either need to be
- content with the divulgence, or not use keywords at all.
-
- In the situation where they choose to divulge, introducing the ability
- to restrict who can see the keyword would also reduce keyword
- overload.
-
- Personal Keywords
-
- Keywords join together a set of bugs which would otherwise be
- unrelated in the bug system.
-
- We allow users to store their own queries. However we don't allow
- them to store their own keywords on a bug. This reduces the
- usefulness of personal queries, since you cannot join a set of
- unrelated bugs together in a way that you wish. Lists of bug numbers
- can work, by they can only be used for small lists, and it is
- impossible to share a list between multiple queries.
-
- Personal keywords are necessary to replace personal tracking bugs, as
- they would not pollute the keyword space. Indeed, on many
- installations this could remove some keywords out of the global
- keyword space.
-
- In a similar vein and with similar effects, group keywords could be
- introduced that are only available to members of a specific group.
-
- Keyword Restrictions
-
- Keywords are not islands unto themselves. Along with their potential
- to be involved in the inter-field relationships mentioned earlier,
- keywords can also be related to other keywords.
-
- Essentially, there are two possibilities:
- * a set of keywords are mutually exclusive
- * the presence of a keyword implies another keyword must be present
-
- Introduction of the ability to specify these restrictions would have
- benefits.
-
- If mutually exclusive keywords were present on a bug, their removal
- would fix up the database, as well as reducing the number of keywords
- on that bug.
-
- In the situation where a keyword implies another keyword, there are
- two possiblities as to how to handle the situation.
-
- The first is automatically add the keyword. This would fix up the
- database, but it would increase the number of keywords on a bug.
-
- The second is to automatically remove the keyword, and alter queries
- so they pick up the first keyword as well as the removed keyword.
- This would fix up the database and reduce the number of keywords on a
- bug, but it might confuse users who don't see the keyword.
- Alternatively, the implied keywords could be listed separately.
-
-Notifications
-
- Every time a bug gets changed notifications get sent out to people
- letting them know about what changes have been made. This is a
- significant feature, and all sorts of questions can be raised, but
- they mainly boil down to when they should be sent and what they should
- look like.
-
- Changes You're Interested In
-
- As of version 2.12 users can specify what sort of changes they are
- interested in receiving notifications for. However, this is still
- limited. As yet there is no facility to specify which keywords you
- care about, and whether you care about changes to fields such as the
- QA contact changes.
- Furthermore, often an unnecessary comment will go along with a change,
- either because it is required, or the commenter is ignorant of how the
- new system works. While explaining why you did something is useful,
- merely commenting on what you did is not because that information is
- already accessible view "Bug Activity".
-
- Because of this unnecessary comment, a lot of changes that would
- otherwise not generate notifications for certain people do so, because
- few people are willing to turn off comments. One way to deal with
- this problem is to allow people to specify that their comments are
- purely explanatory, and that anyone who is not interested in the
- change will not be interested in the comment.
-
- Furthermore, one possible rationale for unnecessary comments is that
- the bug activity does not display on the normal page and hence it is
- difficult to cross reference comments and actions. Hence, it would be
- beneficial to be able to do this.
-
- Bugs You're Watching
-
- Currently to receive a notification about a bug you need to have your
- name on it. This is suboptimal because you need to know about a bug
- before you can receive notifications on it. Often you are interested
- in any bug with a field set to a specific value. For example, you
- might be interested in all bugs with a specific product, component or
- keyword.
-
- If someone could automatically receive notifications about these bugs,
- it would make everyone's lives easier. Currently the default assignee
- and QA contact for a component will automatically receive
- notifications for
-
- Question: This moves half way to a BCC.
-
- Bulk Changes
-
- A very useful feature of Bugzilla is the ability to perform an action
- on multiple bugs at once. However, this means that similar
- notifications are currently generated for each bug modified.
-
- This can result in a torrent of notifications that can annoy.
-
- Furthermore, since the bugs are all changed close to each other in
- time, it is easy for someone to mass delete all the notifications
- generated by a bulk change and miss an unrelated notification in the
- middle.
-
- These factors can lead to a tendency for people to delay bulk changes,
- or avoid them entirely. This is suboptimal.
-
- It would be better if a bulk change generated only one notification
- mail. This would vastly reduce the annoyance factor, and prevent
- accidental deletion of notifications.
-
- One problem with this change is that some people separate out
- notifications using filtering. This means that they would no longer
- be match parts of a bulk change under different filtering rules.
-
- One possibility to resolve this is to allow people to specify groups
- of bugs. All bugs within a group would go into the same
- notification. The filters could then distinguish the different bug
- groups.
-
- In any case, it is likely there would need to be a transition period
- to allow people to alter their filters.
-
-Nominations
-
- ?
-
-Linking Bugzilla Installations
-
- The first example of linking Bugzilla installations together has is
- the introduction of bug moving in version 2.12. However, it would be
- useful to be able to link installations in more ways.
- * Dependencies and other relationships between bugs in other
- installations. This is difficult because dependencies are
- synchronised on both bugs, so the installation that changes
- dependencies would need to communicate the new state to the other
- installation. It would also mean that relationships and
- notifications that refer to other bugs would need to communicate
- with the other installation.
- * References to bugs in other installations. Currently if you type
- "bug XXX" or "bug #XXX" where XXX is a number, you get an
- automatic hyperlink to that bug. It would be useful if you could
- say "YYY bug #XXX" where YYY is the name of another installation.
-
-Retirement
-
- ?
-
-Whiny Reports
-
- ?
-
- Group Redesign
-
- ?
-
- Hard Wrapping Comments
-
- Currently Bugzilla "hard wraps" its comments to a specific line size,
- similar to E-Mail. This has various problems:
- * The way it currently works, wrapping is done in the browser at
- submission time using a non-standard HTML extension not supported
- by some (uncommon) browsers. These browsers generate comments
- that scroll off the right side of the screen.
- * Because comments are of fixed width, when you expand your browser
- window, the comments do not expand to fit available space.
-
- It would be much better to move to a world of soft wrapping, where the
- browser wraps the text at display time, similar to a world processor.
- And as in a word processor, soft wrapping does not preclude the
- insertion of newlines.
-
- Hard wrapping is too entrenched into text E-Mail to fix, but we can
- fix Bugzilla without causing any problems. The old content will still
- be wrapped too early, but at least new content will work.
-
scratch an itchwhen it comes to functionality. - Thus this section is very malleable, subject to change without notice, etc. - You'll probably also notice the lack of formatting. I apologize that it's - not quite as readable as the rest of the Guide. -