Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

Jesse Keating jkeating at redhat.com
Mon Apr 20 03:23:29 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 09:01 +0800, John Summerfield wrote:
> I'm the only person able to assess the importance of a bug _to me._ If a 
> bug in any package, no matter how unimportant it might seem to some 
> triager, prevents my use of a computer, then that bug is critically 
> important to me.
> 
> That importance does not mean that anyone has to assign massive 
> resources to fixing it, but dismiss my assessment as irrelevant and I 
> will be offended.

This is exactly why I don't expect this experiment to work.  Everybody's
bugs are critical _to_ _them_.  If you give them a box to twiddle to
express this, and false hope that it is actually listened to, they will
twiddle it as high as it will go, and if you twiddle it back down,
you've just pissed off the reporter.

The priority and severity can be useful to the maintainer, to help them
determine what they need to work in in what order, however often those
values will not match the values the reporter things they should be.  So
either the reporter is going to get pissed we changed it, or revert war
it, or we just go back to ignoring those fields.  If the reporter never
had the opportunity to set such things, or never saw the fields, they
couldn't possibly be offended when/if they change.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/attachments/20090419/02230cb9/attachment.sig>


More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list