Description Flags and Tracking Bugs

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# 6.3. Description Flags and Tracking Bugs

Since I last posted on this issue, we now have "keywords" that solve
many of the issues of description and status whiteboard keywords. We
have seen a migration towards keywords, but there is still further to
go.
Description ( + Status Whiteboard ) Keywords
--------------------------------------------
Some description keywords remain. I'd like to hear what reasons, other
than time, there are for these staying as they are. I'm suspecting many
are not really being used. Hopefully we can totally remove these
eventually.
Tracking Bugs
-------------
When I suggested keywords, I did so to get rid of tracking bugs too,
though we've had less success on that front.
There are many disadvantages to tracking bugs.
- They can pollute bugs counts, and you must make sure you exclude
them. I believe the meta keyword might be used for this purpose.
- They have an assignee but there is nothing to fix, and that person can
get whined at by Bugzilla.
- It would be better to craft your own "dependency tree" rather than
rely on a fixed hierachy in the bug system.
- In creating a nice little hierachy, many bugs duplicate information
that should be available in other ways, eg
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12833" which is
about beta 1 networking issues. These could fall behind the actual
data. What tracking bugs are good for, ad hoc lists, is what keywords
are better for.
- An automatically generated dependency structure between one "tracking
bug" and another would be better than a manual one, since it gives exact
rather than manually set up classifications.
Probably the only feature preventing tracking bugs being replaced is the
dependency tree. The quintessential tracking bug seems to be bug #7229
"chofmann's watch list", which probably has about a couple of hundred
bugs at various levels, which allows a nice visualisation.
Before keywords can replace tracking bugs better visualisation is going
to be required. General summary reports and dependency forests of a bug
list ("http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12992") could both
help, but neither solves the problem totally. Perhaps keywords within
keywords would help here. In any case, I'm still thinking about this
one.
Some tracking bugs could definitely be turned into keywords immediately
though, and I'll point the finger at
"http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7954" here since that's
what came to mind first.

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