I decided to have a look at what was happening with bugzilla after their release manager and lead code review guy bitched on his LiveJournal blog about how the project was doomed if they stayed with Perl, and that the code being unmaintainable cruft was because Perl made them do it.
I don't think the project is hampered by any problems that aren't entirely of the developers own making. There is a decade of technical debt accumulated by never using CPAN if somebody can write the same code without tests, documentation or a clear API or even halfway decent code (with the exception of sanity prevailing for TT and Email::* after years of horrific code).
So I corrected him (and a couple of other trolls), and pointed out that the problem was social rather than technical, and after a bit, the natives revolted, as it were.
The bugzilla wiki page on comparing languages (that was a good idea, invite every troll and zealot to come and throw fecal matter at each other), has been invaded by the usual slashdot crowd of perl-hating fucktards, and Max calls it a healthy discussion while singling out Perl for trolling grocery lists of personal grievances.
In the years since I used bugzilla last, surprisingly little has changed, new features are either negligable, most work has been fixing the bugs, or fixing the fixes to bugs, and the code review process seems to consist of sysadmins and students, or developers who use perl as a 3rd or 4th language and don't know it well. Very much a case of the blind leading the blind.
Re:Perl community to Bugzilla community...
sigzero on 2007-05-14T19:10:59
Is that your honest opinion? Bugzilla is somewhat in the public eye I guess and I would rather see it be helped and not ported to yet another language.Re:Perl community to Bugzilla community...
merlyn on 2007-05-15T01:57:57
I'm halfway kidding. But if they're gonna make a messy program and put it in the public eye and then blame the tools, it really doesn't help Perl to have that out there.Re:Perl community to Bugzilla community...
sigzero on 2007-05-15T13:17:27
I totally agree with that. Even reading that they are "refactoring" and with the person in questions ideas on Perl, I wonder how good that "refactoring" actually is.Re:Perl community to Bugzilla community...
stu42j on 2007-05-15T15:44:35
After reading through the thread on the developer's mailing list, I can say that Max's opinions do not represent the Bugzilla development team as a whole. Some of the developers agree with him but others intend to continue working to improve the Perl codebase. Help/advise from the gurus of the Perl community would also be appreciated.
Re:wiki url
TeeJay on 2007-05-14T18:28:16
Oh, apparently Max's contributions to Perl's cons list are sancrosanct - not to be removed on pain of losing the ability to edit the wiki from your account, this despite both his blog entries and his trolling being thoroughly debunked.
