[Hamara-devel] Use blocks and depends-upon fields in bugzilla to use bugzilla more effectively.

[shirish]

Hi all,
We are using bugzilla in the most simplest sense as of now. It would be 
nice and better if we start using blocks and depends-upon fields as well 
so we could track changes if they are dependencies for a large change. I 
am going to use an example to illustrate the point.

Let's say there's a company who is into software development and using 
bugzilla to find and squash bugs.

Now a big change happened during software development of a particular 
application, say that the application was either 16-bit/32-bit and 
changed to 64-bit or the application was single threaded and it was 
decided/needed to make it multi-threaded.

In either of the cases above, the change is large and would need changes 
elsewhere in the software development process. For e.g. in the fictional 
multi-threading software example, there would be at least 3 bugs or 
steps that would need to be done.

a.If the application is made of several components, re-write maybe the 
simplest piece of code, compile it and test it.
b.Document all the components and have the diagram explaining the 
relationships between the components and see which need to be 
multi-threaded first and which can or need to be handled later.
c.Document and have a test harness for the project.
d.Have a compiler which has multi-thread compilation switches and some 
way to test that the binary compiled is good and multi-threaded.

Now all these tasks are somewhere dependant on each other while at the 
same time they can be done in a parallel manner. Each step or 
combination of steps would be a bug by itself, with each being a blocker 
for the app. to be declared multi-threaded.

Tests could be blockers in themselves as well as other parts above.

The two fields just before we submit a bug could be used for dependency 
tracking. It might be also possible to have a dependency graph from 
bugzilla but haven't looked at that.

While we might not have come across such type of bugs now but surely 
would once we are in the midst of integrating. The simplest example I 
can think of are when transitions are happening. While debian uses 
https://release.debian.org/transitions/ for developers to make it easier 
to have a bird's eye-view on a transition of a library we would have to 
use bugzilla if we don't use transitions like structure.

Look forward to feedback.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org