gecko-dev/webtools/bugzilla/docs/sgml/future.sgml

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<chapter id="future">
  <title>The Future of Bugzilla</title>
  <synopsis>Bugzilla's Future.  Much of this is the present, now.</synopsis>
  <para>
  Bugzilla's future is a constantly-changing thing, as various developers
  <quote>scratch an itch</quote> 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.
    </para>
    <para>
    <literallayout>
                               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 &amp; 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.
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