577944 - (wontfix+addonwanted) [meta] Bugs / RFEs that have been or should be resolved WONTFIX, but would make a nice extension / addon, or a patch would be accepted

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Tracking, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

In support of Mozilla's drive to develop products through extensions / addons that might later make their way into the core application...

Only bugs that fullfill ALL of the following criteria should be added to the depends-on field of this bug:
- Resolution: Wontfix AND
- Involved parties, especially developers and bug triagers, mostly agree that the idea of the bug is good and would make a nice extension / addon.
- Perhaps we can also add bugs that could or should be resolved "WONTFIX" + "want_extension". This would reduce the number of open bugs while being appreciative and data-efficient in handling such good ideas whose time hasn't come (yet).

This is a meta bug to provide a list of bug cases in support of

Bug 522873  - BMO: change WONTFIX resolution into a value pair (like DUPLICATE of XX), with new sub-values: "has extension", "needs extension"

I am constantly seeing bugs that contain valid and good ideas, but developers have to mark them WONTFIX because they will never have the time to do them themselves, or they don't want these ideas to go into the core application (yet). However, they would gladly accept if someone wrote an addon (cf. Mozilla's addon-based application development policy).

If such good ideas are resolved with a plain WONTFIX, they will disappear without trace, as we have no way of distinguishing good and bad ideas, they all just have unspecified WONTFIX resolution (current definition: "...is a bug which will never be fixed."). Iow, we are losing valuable data about the quality of an idea. To avoid this, I proposed in Bug 522873 that WONTFIX resolution should be evolved into a value pair with a secondary dropdown, like we now have when resolving duplicate:

Status: [Resolved v] [WONTFIX v] [---           v]
                                 |has addon      |
                                 |want addon     |
                                 |rejected       |

Please vote and/or comment on Bug 522873 if you agree this might evolve into something useful. Suggestions for improvement welcome.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks, improvements of summary always welcome :)

Putting [meta] to the beginning of summary for better visibility in message list, given longer summary.
Could also help to make meta bugs summaries more consistent, when they all have [meta] at beginning of summary. Let me know if you see disadvantages in that, and if you'd think they outweigh.

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I support the general sentiment of this bug, but I don't think that implementing this as a tracking bug makes sense. And since this isn't really an actively-owned problem, I'm going to close this bug out.