Fri, 22 Apr 2005

The phrase ‘enterprise software’ gives me hives right now, basically. This thought on enterprise software (the comment, not the original post), which talks about enterprise software being almost more a state of mind than a technical quality, is the first thing I’ve seen that gives me some of the tools to express my unease. I’ll probably rant more later.

Andrew Morton, at his keynote this morning, suggested that the kernel badly needs to use bugzilla more. I clapped loudly (and I think some thought rudely. Oh well, that certainly wasn’t the intent.) He said something about bugzilla that I’d never heard before, and I think maybe that’s been years since that happened. Bonus, I think he was right :) Basically, lkml is a many-to-many attack on bugs; bugzilla narrowcasts and hence is essentially point-to-point (or at least vastly narrows, if you use lists.) That’s a big change for lkml, and (from their POV) a big bug, and they need to fix it. I’m probably going to lose sleep thinking about the implications and potential solutions. (I think Seth Nickell has hinted in this direction before, but if so, he’s never presented the statement to me in a way that made it clear and made the issue so obvious to me. Sorry, Seth. :)

My talk is nearly done. I’m not nearly as satisified as I was with my ‘why everyone should use bugzilla’ talk and paper from OLS a few years ago, but I won’t be embarassed to give it in the morning, despite following Eben. We’ll see, I guess…