120248 - allow components and bugs to exist in more than one product

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 55970

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Sylvain FABRE]

Firstly, sorry for my english which is not really good.
I am working in Nextream (basically 
MPEG2 products) and we use a MODIFIED version of Bugzilla inside our laboratories, because we 
find it stable, powerful, even if the code seems "strange" in certain CGI files. The internally 
modified version (called Nextbug) is based upon Bugzilla 2.10.
I regularly check 
bugzilla.mozilla.org and see that you decide to generalize Bugzilla as a  great bug management 
tool.
I have read your "Master Plan" and i think you forget to speak about the database design : it 
must be completely redesigned (in my humble opinion) to fit with your long terms 
objectives.
For example : A component is only attached to one product. And what about different 
products sharing same software components ? It is the case here in Nextream : we are developping 
MPEG2 multiplexor and MPEG2 encoders and they are sharing some pieces of software.
Another 
example : With this architecure (a component with many products), a bug found in the product X 
could also be found in the product Y. So, a bug is not only attached to one and only one product, but 
could be attached to all the products sharing the component concerned.

In fact, the 1-1 
cardinality between bugs-product and component-product must become a 1-n cardinality. Our 
version is at the moment implemented the 1-n cardinality between component and product.

So 
what about the database redesign ?

Comment 1

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Generally we would create a third product for the shared part.

Comment 2

[Thomas F. O'Connell]

this bug seems particularly relevant especially to the Mozilla project now that
there are so many related projects that encompass portions of the main Mozilla
product. for instance, there are a number of bugs in the Browser component that
will naturally be duplicated in Chimera and Phoenix since these are browser
(note small 'b') projects.

i'm in a web tech company that, again, could use a feature that allowed a bug to
reside in multiple components, for instance. it's a similar issue, but just as
useful.

Comment 3

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them.

Comment 4

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning all of my "future" targetted bugs to indicate that I'm not presently
working on them, and someone else could feel free to work on them. (sorry for
the spam if you got this twice, it didn't take right the first time)

Comment 5

[Gordon Schumacher]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Generally we would create a third product for the shared part.

The problem with creating a third product is that this works okay if all of your
Bugzilla-users are developers on the product; it doesn't work so well if some of
them are end-users.

It's not realistic (at least, not in my scenario) to expect end-users to realize
that product foo's components also apply to products bar and frob.

Besides, what about this scenario (which is exactly what I'm dealing with):
Product A uses components i, j, k, and l.
Product B uses components i and j.
Product C uses components i, k, and l.

Now you've basically dictated that i, j, k, and l are all their own products -
which pretty much kills the concept of components outright, yes?

Comment 8

[shassell]

Basically current release makes the following happen:

Project A
   Must Add component A
   Must Add component .
   Must Add component n

Project B
   Must Add component A
   Must Add component .
   Must Add component n

.
.

Project N
   Must Add component A
   Must Add component .
   Must Add component n

----

Instead would like to see:

Add component A
Add component .
Add component n
Save one Component List


Add project A
    Select components from saved component lsit

Add project .
    Select components from saved component list

Add project .
    Select components from saved component list

Add project N    
    Select components from saved component list

Comment 11

[Frédéric Buclin]

This would require a huge rewrite of the Bugzilla code as e.g. custom fields and flags can be product or even component-specific, same for versions and milestones. Our current approach is to use sightings for bugs, see bug 55970.