bugzilla blocking concrete proposal

[Wayne Schuller <k_wayne linuxpower org>]

hi Luis and everyone,

> No, no, no. I never said 'translators and 1.4 hackers shouldn't use
> bugzilla.' I said, very specifically,  'very old bug-buddies should
not
> function.' The leap between the two of those is /vast/.

The size of that leap is the question at hand. 

If we block useful reports we are doing an evil thing (tm).

My point is: when doing any large scale culling or blocking, lets be
VERY careful not to lose anything useful.

Having said that, I am now feeling like I want to help find a good way
to block reports from apps that are too old.

Here is my idea: 
	In the products xml file for gnome bugzilla, lets add a field called
"minimum_version". We should hack bug-buddy to only let the user submit
a report if they have this minimum version.

	For example: we would set the minimumversion of gnome-core to be 1.2.4
(which is the version that shipped with RH 7.1). If the user had an
earlier version bug-buddy would warn them or stop them. 

	(a warning might be better, we don't want users faking their version
field just to get past the check - that would cause much confusion)

	It would be up to the maintainers to decide which is the oldest version
of their package they want to be the cut-off.

	How would the maintainers control this?
	I suggest a simple csv or xml file in the bugzilla cvs module. I could
hack the create-products.xml script to insert the field into the right
place in the xml file.
	As most people aren't familiar with the bugzilla cvs module, everything
should be documented in a toplevel README.

	What if maintainers didn't use this field?
	If the field is blank than bug-buddy will work as normal. Probably
someone like luis or kmarass would help keep it up to date also.

What do you think of this idea?

If people are keen, I can write the server side stuff, I'd be willing to
write the bug-buddy patches also, maybe boc will want to though.

And of course this will only help us for future years, not with the old
bug-buddy's living in the world now. 

And of course this feature could be used for evil (such as blocking out
all reports except from the current platform). In good faith I think it
could be used to block our truly useless reports.

ta,
wayne



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