326069 - Consider changing the colours in the showdependencygraph to represent Priority or Severity

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Dependency Views, enhancement)

Description

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0

Instead of the usual green, perhaps the colours Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and LightBlue can be used to indicate either priority or severity of some bugs.  That way, at a glance, it'd be easy to see which bugs are on the critical path ot getting stuff done.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. show bug
2. click to show dependency graph
3. marvel at the green, wonder which bug to work on next.

Actual Results:  
The user has no immediate information as to which bug's most important

Expected Results:  
"Red?!?  Better work on that one next," he decided, viewing the the array of bugs ahead of him.

this bug rather clashes with bug 304135 , which is an effort to either use a different hard-coded single colour value, or allow the user to change the single colour value to another single colour.  Any work on this kind of idea would haev to co-exist with that bug, which means we'd have to do a tri-state setup where the user could have 
  o   classic grey and green (and maybe with bug 304135 acting here)
  o   grey and a rainbow of marshmallow colours
  o   some third setup where it's grey or white, for BW printing?

I have a patch, although 
1) I suck at perl, but perl sucked first
2) I have NO idea how to access @::legal_priorities when I'm in showdependencygraph.cgi, and I've spent 5 hours on it.
3) the patch will be ugly since I was poking around.

Comment 1

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

Attachment: hilariously bad diff showing part of the work as a demonstration of the idea

Comment 2

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

/me likes the general idea.

What happens if there are more than five priority levels defined?

Comment 3

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

Attachment: patch to localconfig to support user-cnfigurable colours

Good point.  Do we allow the user to configure them on setup, then?  How about a section right under the severities and priorities?  

I'd patch the .cgi code but I'm unable to access @::legal_priorities as it is (which is really the only reason I don't have a working prototype right this moment!)

Comment 4

[Marc Schumann [:Wurblzap]]

The field value lists have moved out of localconfig into the database in the meantime, so I'd say localconfig is not the right place to store the list. Which Bugzilla version are you working on? In order for an enhancement patch to get checked in, it needs to apply to the most current revision. If you have a chance, can you work against a CVS HEAD checkout? You won't have trouble with $::legal_priority there, either, because it should be possible to use get_legal_field_values('priority').

I'd go for a hard-coded list or colours for now. Let bug 304135 do the work of making the list editable. Perhaps you can fall back to the last entry in the colour list if the priority list is longer?

Comment 5

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

Well, I've certainly been outed as far as versions go.  Mine's not that new at all, being the one I installed a ways back:  I had a problem migrating some time ago, never tried again.  It's so old, the dependency graph still goes from right-to-left and bottom-to-top! (or did before I swapped the dotty arrow in my copy)

I'll grab the source later on this week and give the cat another swing then.