phoebe ayers wrote:
There are many good ideas in this list. I have one
small idea re:
bugzilla -- is it possible to make browsing bugs more transparent
(like a link on the sidebar)? I only just discovered that it's
possible to look at bugs by category, component or keyword rather than
search, and for the hapless newbie who is nonetheless sometimes
interested in looking (at) bugs to see what's going on (like me) it
would help. First rule of taxonomies: everyone describes stuff
differently, so browse is useful :)
I don't know about others, but I personally find the Bugzilla interface to
be a complete pain-in-the-ass and just generally awful. Any search of the
bugs in the system is often slow and filled with noise.
One way to solve this is to bypass the current Bugzilla interface
altogether. In the same way that people can create neat and awesome tools
using the replicated wiki databases, the Bugzilla database can (and should)
be replicated to Toolserver users to allow them to have direct database
access.
Direct database access makes it infinitely easier to build tools that could,
for example, support a better tagging system. I'd like to see all bugs that
affect wikipedia, that affect en.wikipedia, that are user interface related,
etc. A separate tags system would be awesome, in my view, as the one in
Bugzilla currently sucks. Direct database access also would allow for better
(and faster) reports that could be output in a web tool or on a wiki (with
versioning!). Which bugs have the most comments? Which bugs have no
comments? Some of this information is query-able from the Bugzilla
interface, but as I said, it's very slow to query and getting the query
written takes way more time and energy than it should (if it's possible at
all).
To this end, I filed a JIRA ticket with the Toolserver ops about getting the
Wikimedia Bugzilla database replicated with public views:
https://jira.toolserver.org/browse/TS-901
I have no tricks up my sleeve to get this moving along other than
occasionally poking people about it, though. :-)
MZMcBride