The Forgotten User

So there is the persona page, the list of "users" that the bugzilla community recognizes. However, there is at least one set of users that has grabbed my attention recently. Mostly because they have been in the IRC the most recently. That group of users is what I am calling the new Bugzilla admin group. These are the guys who:

• Have never installed apache
• Have never installed mysql
• Have never installed perl
• Have never installed or admined bugzilla

It seems like the Bugzilla community has more or less given up on helping these guys and figured "eh, let them come to the IRC channel" (understandably so, which I will explain in a bit). Unfortunately I think a lot of these users don't even know how to get into the IRC (just a guess). I think by lowering the barrier of entry to installing Bugzilla we can drastically increase the number of people who use Bugzilla. The problem (and reason why many of the Bugzilla developers have given up on this part) is that setting up apache, mysql, perl really isn't the responsibility of Bugzilla developers. It really makes me wish there was an easier way of doing it. At first I thought, "Hey, I write installers for work, I'll do it for Bugzilla" the problem is then I have to maintain it every time windows/osx/linux changes or does something funny. Mkanat basically said it needs to be fully automated, which seems to be the best case. So lets say people didn't have a hard time installing apache, mysql, and perl, then how could we make setting up Bugzilla easier. I'm not sure if I know the answer either. Maybe some nice System admin will figure out a good way of doing it.

Until then, people who want to try out Bugzilla for the first time. I salute you!