Should enhancement requests be allowed in bugzilla?

[Bruno Medeiros]

Brad Roberts wrote:
>> 2) Discussion
>>
>> Bugzilla is not well suited to discussion and debate on the merits and 
>> demerits of a proposed feature. It has no threading ability. The emails 
>> it generates for each addition will become noise, making the email 
>> feature fairly unusable. The newsgroups are the right tool for 
>> discussion. (Digital Mars has a signup for a mailing list. The only
>> people who ever signed up for it were spammers, which cements my opinion 
>> that mailing lists are the wrong format for discussion.)
> 
> I agree that the bugzilla issue/comment list isn't ideal, but neither is 
> the news group.  Nothing is, so let's look at where strengths lie:
> 
> Newsgroups:
>   -- more flexible posting/reading mechanisms
> 
> Bugzilla
>   -- issue state tracking, nothing gets lost
>   -- (re-)prioritization or (re-)categorization, no problem with 
>      'misfiled' issues.
> 
> I'm sure more can be come up with on both sides, but it's not really the 
> focus of this topic, so I'll leave it alone unless someone feels the need 
> to continue to debate this point.
> 

The Newsgroup is much better than the bugzilla for this purpose. See OP 
with reply to Sean Kelly. I also disagree on the supposed disadvantages 
"issue state tracking, nothing gets lost" and "(re-)prioritization or 
(re-)categorization", see below.

>> 4) Wikis
>>
>> The wikis have done a good job of organizing, summarizing and 
>> prioritizing enhancement requests. It takes extra effort to add 
>> something to the wiki, which serves to filter out enhancement requests 
>> that don't have at least some strong positive feeling about them.
> 
> I agree that the wiki(s) around have been filling this role.  Until 
> recently they've been the only option so people have used what's 
> available.  However, that doesn't mean they're _good_ at the role.  
> They're good at many editor style collaberative documentation and 
> referencing other bits of documentation.  They're not good at tracking 
> state, categorization, prioritization, or capturing a thread of comments.
> 

tracking state:
The only state Bugzilla can track is whether the enhancement was 
implemented or not. It has no way to track, for each enhancement/issue, 
what is the overall opinion of the D users, how extensively was an issue 
discussed, the rating of each possible alternatives etc. I don't think 
that it is even possible to do this numericaly (like voting), making a 
text-editing tool like Wiki more adequate.


categorization:
I disagree, the Wiki is just as good at that as Bugzilla, perhaps even 
better.

prioritization:
Prioritization is not an important feature for a design issue tracking. 
  In fact prioritization doesn't even make sense if there is no 
consensus, which will be the most common case.

capturing a thread of comments:
True the Wiki is not good at this, but neither is Bugzilla.


-- 
Bruno Medeiros - CS/E student
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D