Paul Rubin wrote: > "Giovanni Bajo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > Does this smell "Bitkeeper fiasco" to anyone else than me?
I probably said as much before, possibly to the distaste of some individuals. Still, the BitKeeper story should serve as a reminder about relinquishing control of infrastructure to some seemingly benevolent third party with their own separate interests. It should especially be a reminder to those who deem Torvalds-style "overt pragmatism" to be virtuous in the face of supposedly ideological realism. Of course, there's presumably a huge gulf between the vendor in this case and the vendor in the BitKeeper case, especially with respect to draconian non-compete clauses and threats to sue one's own customers. However, it's certainly not some kind of heresy to at least question the wisdom of moving community resources and services around in such a way. After all, this situation has been brought about because of a dependence on a supposedly unreliable commercial third party. > Sounds crazy, what's wrong with bugzilla? Well, Bugzilla is a bit of a monster. ;-) Seriously, having installed it, it seems like a relic of the early CGI period with a bunch of files that you're supposed to throw in a CGI directory before performing .htaccess surgery, which they admittedly do for you if you choose to trust that particular method of deployment. Contrast that with various other common Web applications which only put actual CGI programs within the CGI directory, making the whole deployment much cleaner and easier to troubleshoot/maintain, and you can see that there's a serious need for some repackaging work. Sure, there are scripts to help check dependencies, which meant a trip to CPAN (not as joyous as its advocates would have you believe), and there is a nice configuration system in Bugzilla's own Web interface which helps you finish the job off (providing you don't forget something in the 16 pages of settings), but there's always this nasty suspicion that something somewhere probably isn't configured properly. Finally, on the subject of the inner workings of Bugzilla, one is presented with the amusement of diving into Perl to fix stuff: something that not everyone is enthusiastic about. As for Bugzilla's interface, it is telling that some open source projects actually put a layer on top of Bugzilla in order to avoid the complexity of the search interface, although it must be said that recent versions don't seem to immediately throw up the page with 40 or so controls on it, just to search for a bug. That said, the fact that many open source projects continue to use Bugzilla would suggest that they're either not interested in or aware of alternatives (quite possible), or they're reasonably happy with it (also quite possible). Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
