Re: Reduced Bugzilla functionality for 6+ months -- acceptable?

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 11:31:28AM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
>> One question I'd have: are there any steps that can be/will be taken
>> to minimize the pain during the inevitable next upgrade? Commitment to
>> getting changes upstream, use of DVCS, etc.? Getting back to trunk
>
> Upstream: I'll check again. I wanted to have as much upstream as
> possible, but seems our BGO diff is a bit large and it would take even
> longer to push things upstream. As the external party is paid, there is
> a limitation on what can be done (would get too expensive).

Oh, I'm fully aware that getting our current full set of patches
upstream would be hard; they were a nightmare years ago, and our
feature set and the pace of upstream's development and refactoring
work have only accelerated since then. I meant more for new features
we might develop after moving to 3.2- what steps will we take to make
sure that we don't end up yet again with a gigantic mess of
unmaintainable and/or non-upstreamable patches?

> Due to non-agreement yet the external party is private for now, so I'll
> try and provide more concrete answers when I get them.
>
> DVCS: Upstream uses CVS. There is a Bzr mirror, not sure how to use that
> effectively.

Ewww. I had assumed that they moved primarily to Hg when the rest of
mozilla did. Perhaps this is a good time to lobby them to move to a
DVCS.

> ATM most of the problems are caused by combination of
>  * lots of differences
>  * lots of changes upstream (don't see how a DVCS would make things any
>   easier with 2.20 -> 3.2 ... but for future should be a good idea)

Right. Again, the problems 2.20->3.2 are unsolvable and the result of
lots of (ugly) history, much of it my fault. I'm not asking for
miracles there. (Miracles would be nice! ;)

The question is how do we avoid it in the future- hopefully part of
the plan is 'do the next upgrade from 3.2->3.4 instead of 3.2->4.20'
:) but I imagine other steps could possibly be taken as well.

Luis