285784 - Addition of resolution textarea field

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Wardell]

When doing reports and generating change logs it would be useful to be able to
store and show a resolution overview. This should be a text area to allow
multiline summaries of the resolution. It would provide a concise way to know
what change was made to resolve (be it a FIXED issue or an INVALID / WONTFIX)
this issue. Changes to this field would be versioned in the bug activity, but
the big difference is that this field would be easily accessible. Another way
that could also address the issue is through the ability to mark one particular
comment as the resolution summary. Bugzilla would them have anchor links to this
comment as well as making the content of that comment available in reports.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

My interest is bugs with workarounds or other information that should be made
easily accessible to the reader in an obvious way.  A resolution summary field
would benefit bugs a) which have tons of comments (due to their popularity or
notariety), b) have complicated explanations, especially those whose potential
solutions or direction have evolved over time, and c) that are WONTFIX and have
external solutions.

An example of "a)" is bug 11459 which as of today has 80 dups and 226 comments
(and still no fix). But one possible generally acknowledged
resolution/workaround is a single URL, in this case the mozex extension.

It would be far better in such cases to provide a link, a summary or a pointer
to an extraordinarily helpful comment in the bug, rather than force the reader
to waid through hundreds of comments. 

Indeed, some PRODUCTS rely on 'workarounds'/extensions to provide popular
additional functionality. Given the increase in such activity, I'm surprised
this bug hasn't been logged earlier or seen greater interest. The need for
fields like this will certainly increase over time. 

I'm not sure my concerns above mesh perfectly with the reporter's suggested
solution(s), but it's a start.

It is worth noting, even though bugzilla isn't a help desk system, most help
desk systems do have a dedicated text field to summarize the resolution.

See also bug 259452

Comment 2

[Simon Green]

We have custom fields if you want to add a resolution field. That would suit this need perfectly.

Plus this bug hasn't been touched in ten years.