We've made a LOT of progress sicne 2.16 in cleaning up Bugzilla's codebase from very strange things that were thrown in all over the place. :-) This bug is a meta-bug to keep track of all the changes that we want to make to Bugzilla's architecture. For the most part, these will not be user-visible changes, but will improve the stability, readability, and maintainability of Bugzilla. The major sorts of changes that need to be done are: 1) Implement our current coding standards universally across the current codebase. 2) Eliminate code duplication by using modules and subroutines. 3) Consolidate useful subroutines scattered around Bugzilla into modules. 4) The database schema should be as fully normalized and as generally organized as possible. Code that accesses the database, like Search.pm or checksetup.pl, should do it in some orderly fashion. 5) Fully separate presentation from actual perl code. Generally, the idea is to move toward being more and more object-oriented, so that whenever I the programmer want to do something, I can just find the right module and call the right function, or use the right method on the right object. (This bug is assigned to me at the moment because I've been working on this sort of stuff lately, and I didn't want it to look like nobody's working on it by assigning it to nobody or general@bugzilla.bugs.)

I'm adding a URL to this bug of an essay that I wrote, which I think is relevant to why these Architectural Improvements are important.

This fellow has some good things to say about code clarity that I hadn't thought about, even though he's talking about C++: http://blogs.msdn.com/ajenner/

And since we're talking about code formatting, let me chime in with an opinion of my own: http://www.heikniemi.net/hc/archives/000103.html (yes, I know at least Max read that already).

*** Bug 104690 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***