202297 - Support cross-product milestones

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 69262

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Shankar Unni]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4a) Gecko/20030401

When you have a suite of products, it becomes a tedious task to define the same
milestones for all the products. Every time a suite milestone has to be added,
one has to add the same milestone to all N products individually.

It should be possible to create an all-products milestone (say, by adding a
milestones entry for product_id "0"), which should be intermixed with the
per-product milestones in the usual way (by selecting on milestones "where
product_id in (ID,0)". 

This might even predicate the existence of a record for product 0, which should
be ignored, or should be shown on the products page as "All products".  Or else,
one could use a product_id of NULL, but that would complicate the querying
somewhat..


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Shankar Unni]

Alternatively, if there was a one-step way to create a milestone and assign it
to multiple products, that would be peachy as well.

Comment 2

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I don't see any dupes.  found a good tracking bug that's discussed it before,
but no specific bug for it yet.

Comment 3

[Bradley Baetz (:bbaetz)]

This would be done by a custom field applied to multiple products.

Comment 4

[Emmanuel Bourg]

Is this a dup of Bug 69262 ?

Comment 5

[Shankar Unni]

Perhaps, though that bug seems to have initially gone down a fancy path
("hierarchies of products"), and then fizzled out (last update 2.5 years ago).

Perhaps one of the bugs can be used to nail down a narrower but still useful
subset of this feature.

Comment 6

[Tom Emerson]

It seems to me that this could be implemented simply in a way that would cover
most of the use cases (or at least my use case): create a new page that provides
a list of projects, allowing multi-selection, and an input box for a milestone
name. That milestone is then created in every selected product.

While this duplicates some information, it has a couple of advantages:

1) It is easy to implement,
2) It does not require a schema change...
3) Or any other semantic change, for that matter.

And providing this implementation does not preclude something more involved
later on.

I'll sign up to implement this, since we need the functionality right now. :-)

Comment 7

[Shankar Unni]

What's missing in tree's proposal (otherwise a good compromise) is the ability
to create a new Product and assign from the existing set of milestones to this
product. 

This is where having a "default product" (product 0) comes in handy: its
properties can be used as a starting (default) point for new products, and any
milestones created for it will apply to all products.

Comment 8

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Something we added at my old workplace was the ability to "clone" an existing
product when creating a new one.  Unfortunately I never got permission to
contribute it (and I can't now because I've seen theirs and they didn't release
it).  If someone wants to run with that idea though... :)

Comment 9

[Tom Emerson]

I think Dave's feature described in comment 8 is a good compromise: cloning an
existing project is something I've written Python code to do in the past: it
would be nice to have that capability from within the administrative UI.

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Reassigning bugs that I'm not actively working on to the default component owner
in order to try to make some sanity out of my personal buglist.  This doesn't
mean the bug isn't being dealt with, just that I'm not the one doing it.  If you
are dealing with this bug, please assign it to yourself.

Comment 11

[Onno Garms]

Even if the products have different milestones, one would like to get them in
the right order.

Say, product A has a milestone "version 2.0" scheduled for march and a product B
has a milestone "version 1.0" scheduled for may. Then sorting bug lists by
milestones, I want to appear version 2.0 of product A before version 1.0 of
product B.

Of course that can be done by defining appropriate sort keys. However the GUI
allows to edit milestones per product only. This makes it difficult to make the
sort keys of different products consistent. You have to maintain an external
list (say milestones.txt) of used sortkeys over all products. For a new
milestone, first update milestones.txt and then update the milestones in bugzilla.

The problem would be solved if there were a page "all product's milestones" that
differs from "Select milestone for A" only by the fact that it shows all product
milestones.

I don't know about the bugzilla implementation, but I think this would require
only a few lines of change. (editmilestones.cgi, when called without a product,
should display the above list below the "select product"-box).

Comment 12

[Frédéric Buclin]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 69262 ***