Bugs should allow for arbitrary key value pairs

[Ted Gould]

I was discussing this idea with a variety of people at UDS, but this is now the formal write up of what I'm thinking.

I think that bugs need an arbitrary field that is available from the API to write key-value pairs and attach them to a bug. This would mean that I could put some arbitrary data, like "tedlovesthisbug" and "true" and attach it to a bug for my particular application that is using the API.

The purpose of this feature would be for other applications to start extending the way that they use the data in Launchpad. For instance, I could have an application that looks at bugs for my project. It could now keep an independent state of what it's done to the bug. Perhaps it needs to parse a log file, or it needs human input on that examination. These would be pieces of data that are not worthy of integration into LP formally, but would allow my tool to be much more effective and could allow LP to organically grow outside the vision of the developers and architects.

I believe that the key and value should be strings, and should be limited in size. There probably should also be some guidelines on how namespaces should be created so that applications don't run over each other.

Lastly, I believe that this change is likely to cause a change to the database schema in LP. I realize that the approval process for these changes can be difficult. I have already discussed this with Mark at UDS and he interested in this feature, and understands that a DB schema change would be required to implement it.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Why do tags not work? the can be retrieve, delimited, and searched.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

On Fri, 2010-01-22 at 06:56 +0000, Curtis Hovey wrote:
> Why do tags not work? the can be retrieve, delimited, and searched.

Because they don't have the ability to attach data to them. They would
work for something like "parsed_log_file" which would have true or false
as a value. But it wouldn't work for things like
"estimated_completion_date" which would have a date as the value.

[Deryck Hodge (deryck)]

Hi, Ted.

Sorry, somehow I missed this bug between taking over as bugs team lead and then it being marked incomplete.

I think this is a fine idea. We've had some similar ideas playing around among us developers on the bugs team as we think about a feature we've been calling "Bug Q&A." Our idea was a bit more structured, i.e. X number of fields of arbitrary data, but the idea was similar.

There are many other higher priority issues underway for Launchpad currently, so I doubt we'll see Bug Q&A or this component of it anytime soon, unless one or more external stakeholders make a case for and champion these features.

But I do like the idea and hope to see something like it implemented eventually.

Cheers,
deryck