Bugzilla browser app :: new idea

Discussing about some new ideas for the HackWeek 3, psankar gave me an idea that we should have an application to browse bugzilla. At first, it sounded like a cool, fun app kinda project. The use case really didn’t strike to me.

A couple of days later, I realized the importance of such an app to QA engineers and non-developers. After looking at the mailboxes of some of my team members at work, I realized the value-propostion of this idea. Most of my teammates are QA engineers and they, of course, receive plenty of bugzilla emails. One email each for change in the bug status, keywords, comments, or any other available field. In the end, these bugs could be those filed by the individual QA engineer himself / herself as well as any product / person they might be responsible / watching. Its evident that each of them end up having a huge collection of “unread” emails.

I did a quick survey on the number of bugzilla emails received by each of my teammates. On an average, each individual receives 33 emails everyday and an average of 1937 emails in their mailbox – all of the above numbers is just for the bugzilla emails. Only one of them had a very different count for the above numbers – ~300 emails per day and ~6000 unread emails.

Phew! I had just found the compelling use case for a standalone app for browsing bugzilla. Did a quick google search for available desktop client for bugzilla and found DeskZilla and a few others. DeskZilla is a Java app with pretty much the same features I had in mind – data caching for offline access, quick local searches, etc. – but I really didn’t like the UI. Yes! That same old Java UI on Linux.. It even kept crashing on me due to “Out of memory” errors. The biggest disappointment is that its not open source!!

So tonight, I started learning Glade and digged a bit about PyGTK. Some questions that I’m still trying to find answers:

  * Which would be a better choice to have a cross platform app – Python, Perl or Mono?
  * For the layout, the only thing that comes to my mind is having a tree view on the left and a preview pane on the right (even DeskZilla has the same layout). Is this the only way to present such data to a user?
  * Been thinking of using sqlite3 for storing data / caching. Would it suffice? How large can a dataset be when it comes to bugzilla data?

Would love to hear any suggestions / thoughts / comments on the above questions as well as the entire idea itself.

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