[dmd-internals] Planning software?

Brad Roberts braddr at puremagic.com
Wed Jan 18 11:11:14 PST 2012


On 1/18/2012 8:35 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> It's simple - planning software has means to rank and track large tasks of coarse granularity. Bugzilla offers as far as
> I can tell ranking by eight predefined severities ("enhancement" through "regression") but no simple way to say "let me
> put this task ahead the other".  There's no way to establish milestones and track progress for a task. There's no way to
> show "top-level" tasks of which many other smaller tasks depend - all you get is a flat view of thousands of issues.
> 
> I'm sure we could devise workarounds, but at best we should use for collaborative planning something that is geared for
> collaborative planning.
> 
> 
> Andrei

Well, then there's the problem.. your understanding of what bugzilla supports.  As I said earlier, there's capabilites
that we're not currently using that we could be.  Please go read up on bugzilla's support of both milestones and fully
customizeable priorities and severities.  The hierarchy part is sort of true.  Bugzilla does have depends on and blocks
relationships that can be established, and you can search based on them.  It's not as good as it could be, but it does
work.  For example, this search shows all open D bugs that block another bug:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&field0-0-0=blocked&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&type0-0-0=notequals&value0-0-0=null&component=DMD&product=D

Also of note, there's a number of major projects that do their entire planning within bugzilla.  A classic example is
the Mozilla guys.. from which bugzilla was borne.  Another is GCC.

I'm not against use of tools (obviously, I've been _the_ person installing and building tools for us so far), should we
find one that's ideal.  But I also don't feel like prioritization, scheduling, and sticking to those are going to be
solved by more tools.  They're social issues.


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