555181 - Bugzilla should be an installable CPAN distribution

Status: REOPENED

(Bugzilla :: Installation & Upgrading, enhancement)

Description

[Gabor Szabo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100214 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.8
Build Identifier: 

Allow the packaging and the distribution of Bugzilla via CPAN.
Step one: packaging and releasing without installation from CPAN
Step two: allow installation from the CPAN package. 

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Gabor Szabo]

Attachment: v1_add_makefile.diff

Initial makefile patch

Comment 2

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Comment on attachment 435207 [details] [diff] [review]
v1_add_makefile.diff

My concern with this is that people will think that they should do "perl Makefile.PL" instead of running checksetup.pl, and then will be very confused when Bugzilla doesn't work.

Will Bugzilla actually work in CPAN with just this? Where will all of the code go?

Also, "use 5.006" is wrong--we require 5.8.1.

I'd put our $VERSION in Bugzilla.pm.

I don't think we require that high of a version of Test::More.

What's up with all those extra directories in no_index?

Also, we do require specific versions of almost all of those "requires" modules. We also "recommend" quite a few other modules. There are also other modules we require that are left out, there.

Is license 'mozilla' the MPL 1.1?

Comment 3

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Also, FWIW, I'd like to see what will be necessary for Step Two before approving Step One. The reason is that I don't want to put Bugzilla up on CPAN with just Step One forever, if we decide not to go ahead with step 2--eventually we'd abandon it, and there'd be an old version of Bugzilla up on CPAN, which would be worse than there being no version of Bugzilla up on CPAN.

Comment 4

[Gabor Szabo]

Attachment: v2_add_makefile.diff

Comment 5

[Gabor Szabo]

1) added a warning that will hopefully make people understand this is not an official release yet.

1b) I'll recommend to set the version number to something like 3.70_01 that will allow the CPAN testers to test the package and people to see Bugzilla on CPAN but the standard tools (e.g. CPAN.pm ) won't yet find it.

2) Bugzilla won't yet work but it could already enter the CPAN testers.

3) version number updated to 5.8.1, there are files in the project that state 5.6 and other that don't say anything. You might consider adding the requirement to every file, just to make it clear to the reader. (the will be a separate patch)

4) I'd also put our $VERSION in Bugzilla.pm but I did not want to touch too many files in this initial patch.

5) In fact I don't see any place where Test::More is explicitly required but it is used in the tests. Set the number to any other value as you think fit.

6) no_index: that was left over from another Makefile.PL, now removed

7) now reusing the prereq list that was already used by Bugzilla.

8) license: mozilla does not point out the exact license: http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Build/lib/Module/Build/API.pod for now I think it is ok but we could ask the maintainers to add separate keys for mozilla_1.0 and mozilla_1.1 if you think it is important to add this information to the META.yml as well

9) I have no idea what will be the next step, though I have a fair guess that it will be quite similar to what Padre has. That's where we will have to learn from each other what Bugzilla needs and what the standard CPAN toolchain might not yet provide. In any case as long as we keep the version number as _XX the package will be marked as "development release". Regular people won't be able to install it via CPAN. If after a few months you see we have not made any progress you'll be able to remove it from CPAN.

Comment 6

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

(In reply to comment #5)
> 3) version number updated to 5.8.1, there are files in the project that state
> 5.6 and other that don't say anything. You might consider adding the
> requirement to every file, just to make it clear to the reader. (the will be a
> separate patch)

  Yeah, we won't do that. It's in checksetup.pl, and it would just be extra cruft for each file. I don't even do that for my CPAN modules.

> 4) I'd also put our $VERSION in Bugzilla.pm but I did not want to touch too
> many files in this initial patch.

  It would be OK to put it in Bugzilla.pm.

> 5) In fact I don't see any place where Test::More is explicitly required but it
> is used in the tests.

  That's where it's required. :-) In the tests. :-D

> 8) license: mozilla does not point out the exact license:
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Module-Build/lib/Module/Build/API.pod for now I
> think it is ok but we could ask the maintainers to add separate keys for
> mozilla_1.0 and mozilla_1.1 if you think it is important to add this
> information to the META.yml as well

  I think it's probably OK--very few people (nobody) uses the MPL 1.0. However, there will be a revision of the MPL coming up, so perhaps that will matter then.

> 9) I have no idea what will be the next step, though I have a fair guess that
> it will be quite similar to what Padre has. That's where we will have to learn
> from each other what Bugzilla needs and what the standard CPAN toolchain might
> not yet provide. In any case as long as we keep the version number as _XX the
> package will be marked as "development release". Regular people won't be able
> to install it via CPAN. If after a few months you see we have not made any
> progress you'll be able to remove it from CPAN.

  Okay. Well, see, I don't see any web applications distributed via CPAN (and particularly not any that have individual .cgi files) at the moment. So right now I'm tending to believe that it will in fact *never* work. I don't want to even put up a development release on CPAN, because people could still search for it and find it, and CPAN has a pretty high pagerank, so it might show up in Google searches for Bugzilla, and then confused people would try to ask us about it on the support list or in IRC (and we might have no idea that that's what their problem was) which leads to quite a bit of wasted time on our part (and there aren't very many of us) and a lot of frustration on the end-user's part.

  So in order to go ahead with this, I at least would like to see some plan or evidence that shows that distributing Bugzilla via CPAN might in fact some day work, and not involve too many invasive changes that would prevent easy installation outside of CPAN.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Buclin]

Based on recent discussions on the future of Bugzilla, I don't think we will follow with path.

Comment 8

[Frédéric Buclin]

Comment on attachment 435369 [details] [diff] [review]
v2_add_makefile.diff

Clearing the request for review as this bug has been marked as wontfix.

Comment 9

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Removing outreachy because team does not have bandwidth to mentor this cycle.