package shepherding

[Leonard den Ottolander]

Hi Mike,

> Exactly.  The problem with the bugzilla priority field is that 
> there is no real definition of what "priority" means.  Priority 
> to WHOM?

I hardly touch that tag myself, although I might set it to high on
severe crashes or security issues, or low to minor issues. But priority
to the developer I would say.

> What the overwhelming majority of people reporting bugs do not 
> realize, is that engineers receiving the bug reports, do not sit 
> in bugzilla 24/7 just fixing bugs.

I do realize that very well. Otoh fixing bugs seems important to me. So
if you can't spend enough time fixing bugs then I would say management
is to blame.

> In 3 years of experience on the receiving end of bug reports, and 
> having played "bug-priority-tag" with at least one or two people 
> a month for the first 6-8 months, I realized the priority field 
> was useless for the purposes that *I* was trying to use it for, 
> which was to indicate what priority the bug DOES have.

I can understand that Alexander and you don't feel like educating the
user every time this happens, but is this mentioned in the bugzilla
accompanying docs? Just a warning: How not to piss of a developer by
repeatedly changing tags and make him loose interest in your problem.

> Since the priority field is so useless, I just totally stopped
> ever even looking at it period.

Maybe the tag should be kept around, just as a decoy, so users don't
start playing "bug-severity-tag" with you ;) .

> One needs to do that because it is impossible to try and manage a 
> 2000 item "TODO" list.

That can be a challenge, I can see that.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research