Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Tue Apr 21 08:14:32 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-04-17 at 12:38 -0400, James Laska wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 10:56 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > 
> > So, really, we just want your feedback: do you think this system might
> > prove useful to you as a maintainer? Can you see any problems with it,
> > or potential refinements or improvements? Bugzappers' mission is to
> > ease
> > the lives of maintainers, so we don't want to put this in place unless
> > it's seen as beneficial by at least some maintainers. Thanks!
> 
> Thanks for the proposal Adam.  I read this as a two-part request.
> Please correct if I've misread.
> 
>      1. First, is a draft definition of bugzilla severity/priority
>         (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Beland/Bugzilla_Legend#Severity_and_Priority) up for review
>      2. Second, is a proposal for how best to incorporate those
>         definitions into QA/BugZapper bug procedures (this thread)

FWIW, both proposals look like a good improvement to me.

The main worry seems to be that we'll get into fights with reporters
over the appropriate values for a given bug, so I'd suggest:

  a) emphasising in the explanation of the fields that they are only a 
     rough guide for the maintainer's benefit in ranking bugs

  b) triagers should limit the changing of these fields to when they 
     are making other some more useful change to the bug - i.e. 
     a triager coming along and *only* changing a bug's 
     priority/severity is more likely to annoy people

  c) as was already said, if all else fails, limit the visibility of 
     the fields to triagers/maintainers

Basically, the content of the report is far more important than these
fields, so we should try and avoid irking bug reporters over something
that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Cheers,
Mark.




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