346841 - supported operating systems should be per-product

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 163778

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement)

Description

[Chet Hosey]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060719 Firefox/1.5.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060719 Firefox/1.5.0.5

It does not always make sense to offer every operating system/platform combination for every product offered, especially for development of diverse products like embedded devices.

Reproducible: Always

Actual Results:  
Supported operating systems and platforms must be enumerated in an external configuration file, and are shown as applicable to all products.

Expected Results:  
Users should be permitted to associate operating systems and platforms with products as appropriate.

Comment 1

[Olav Vitters]

Per product platforms is bug 163778.

Comment 2

[Chet Hosey]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 163778 ***

Comment 3

[timeless]

Could you possibly actually describe a real instance of this?

specifically, name 3 products, 3 components per product, and platforms/OSs for each product.

Comment 4

[Chet Hosey]

I don't use Bugzilla directly, only in support of various users who often do embedded development.

Suppose there's a traditional, non-embedded application. Suppose another application which does run on an embedded device -- it doesn't make sense to prompt someone submitting the bug relevant to the latter application for PC operating systems when it may run on an RTOS or directly on the hardware.

Comment 5

[timeless]

suppose you come up with a real example instead of hypotheticals i can't wrap my head around. if it's a real problem it really shouldn't be that hard for you to find some.

note that I'm probably going to work on this (eventually I expect selling bugzilla to sun will require it), but I need some real world input in order to provide a real solution that scales. So far most "designs" would result in *huge* headaches.

Can you honestly imagine trying to setup 10 specific platforms/os's for each of 1000 products? The odds of you messing up and ending up w/ at least 5 spellings/cases of some platforms/os's are very very high.

It's trivial for an admin today to make a custom enter template which hides certain values for certain products.

Comment 6

[Chet Hosey]

This bug was reported by the developers I support. I don't know much of the details of what they develop, and most of it I can't disclose.

The point is clear enough -- there are classes of software for which not all platforms make sense, or ever make sense. I can provide examples of applications for which there is very little likelihood of platform overlap all day long ( {toasters, microwaves, cell phones, medical devices} vs. {CAD application | office suite | video editing software } } ). However, I get the impression that even the most specific and detailed examples of these sorts of applications will be met with "This isn't worth implementing, because it's not a big deal" or "I can't figure out how to present this to the user in a way that isn't a huge pain for them to use."

Those are certainly sensible responses, but as that's the case, I'm not going to waste my time coming up with specific hypothetical examples, and I can't disclose the real-world examples my developers have described with specificity.