31706 - Use NNTP for comments

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I'm leaning a bit widely out, but here's my proposal:



Use newsgroups for creation and storage of comments. Set up a news server für

bugzilla and you can give each bug its own newsgroup. Then use any open source

web/new gateway to show the articles in the bug page like today (just that they

are hierarchical now). You can use mozilla.org's mail/news-gateway for the cc

functionality (with the cc field in the bug page as frontend).



Advantages:

- Bugzilla commments are only linear and don't scale. Some bugs are very

controversive and a lot of discussion is going on, in which case it is hard to

track several subparts of discussions.



- I sometimes menually quote, when I reply to bugzilla comments, and then wish

to have the comfort of a mailnews-client.



- When I write long comments (and get distracked and surf during writing), I

fear, that Navigator or Mozilla could crash, and

  - open a new mail

  - copy and paste the comment to it

  - save the mail as draft

This would be just a "Save as draft" or even an autosave with Mailnews.



- I could use HTML for comment formatting, if I need to.



- I believe, it's the "right thing". NNTP is the most widely used system for

internet-based discussion and it evolved a lot because of that, much more than

bugzilla propably can. The above mentioned advantages are just examples for that.



Disadvantages:

- Other fields:

It's hard to edit the owner, state etc. with a mailnews client.

You can't make the field only changable via web *and* force comment with certain

changes (creation, reassign etc.), because the longest comments (=> the changes,

where I like to have my maiknews-client most) often go along with exactly these

changes.

I have no good solution yet.

In any case, all information should be accessible via news, i.e. field changes

should be posted like current bugzilla spam.



- Authentication/Signing

You can hardly password-protect newsgroups, but the user can sign his/her mail,

which gives much stronger security (which is an advantage).

The author of the comment should appear in the from field (according to RFC822,

IIRC), even if compoosed via bugzilla form (now the web-gateway). The origin

(bugzilla webform) could be noted anyhow in the body, so the reader knows, that

the comment is password-authenticated.

But how can the reader be sure, the whole msg has been sent by bugzilla? I could

imitate the form of the body of an bugzilla post and you would only, if at all,

notice the difference in the header.

I think, we can't sign it, because 4.x only compares the key with the from field

(which is a somewhat broken behaviour). We can't use special fields either,

because the news server should be the main comment store, and I can fake every

field you introduce other than the SMTP server log.

Maybe we could run |cron|ed sanity-checks for posts, which look like bugzilla

posts, but are none (i.e. reach the news server from somewhere else than the

bugzilla web-gateway server)?



Additional Comments:

- Why bugzilla is a discussion forum

You might say, that comments are just that - they only supply additional

information to field changes. I disagree. I guess, the fact, that current bugs

often looks exactly that way is just, that Netscape employees use a lot of

out-of-band communication - face-to-face, phone, mail, etc. I think to have

noticed, that bugs, which involve non-Netscape-employees, tend to be much

"longer" (have more and longer comments).

Much of Mozilla-related discussion is related to any bug, and it makes sense, to

keep it in only one place.

Comment 1

[Terry Weissman]

[e-mail] is the new owner of Bugzilla and Bonsai.  (For details,
see my posting in netscape.public.mozilla.webtools,
news://news.mozilla.org/38F5D90D.F40E8C1A%40geocast.com .)

Comment 2

[Chris Yeh]

i think using NNTP for comments has some merits, but it also raises the level of 
complexity of bugzilla by several factors. in addition to configuring a 
webserver, cgi environment, perl environment, and a database, you'd have to 
properly configure mail gateways and a newsserver as well.

Comment 3

[Stephan Niemz]

moving to real milestones...

Comment 4

[Andreas Franke (gone)]

-> Bugzilla product, General component, reassigning.

Comment 5

[Adam Katz]

see also bug 116482 which tries to get similar features in bugzilla via web
forum style, similar to Kuro5hin's Scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org) or
Slashdot's SlashCode (http://slashcode.org).  I believe that a departure from
the current web forum method would result in less participation.  (NNTP may also
make entries read by Carnivore ;-)

Comment 6

[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 7

[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 8

[Enrico Weigelt]

hmm, I think coming from the other side is better:

add an NNTP-gateway to bugzilla, which represents bug comments as news postings. 
It would have several namespaces w/ different mapping/presentation schemes. One could be:

+ Group names consist of <product>.<component>
+ Bugs are represented as threads. 
+ Each thread has an start posting w/ all bug fields in some specific format
+ Comments, state changes and other events are simply shown as subsequent postings in this thread
+ New postings are parsed and scanned for several robot commands, so bug actions beside commenting can be done via email/news posting.

This news-server/mail-bot should be an additional package which accesses the bugzilla backend via an uniform robot interface as I suggested in bug 345030

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

re comment 8: This would surely take care of comment 2, but fail on point 2 of:

The 2 main intentions of this proposal were:
- Being able to use the mail/usenet client for posting
- Getting hierarchical threads in bugzilla

Comment 10

[Frédéric Buclin]

This involves too much complexity to have Bugzilla work, and you can already commit bug changes from your email client thanks to email_in.pl. Also, I don't know how security bugs would be considered in this proposal but this is not managable, IMO.