When do regressions become high priority for developers?

[Dan Kegel]

Matt Perry wrote:
> When do regressions become high priority for developers?
> [SecureCRT broke with wine-0.9.54,
> http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13583 ]
> 14 months seems to be more than reasonable to repair a regression.

That's a tough question.    Note that Photoshop CS3
installer has been busted for months, and is in a similar
limbo.  (We even know how to fix it, but nobody has
time at the moment.)

Often people will fix regressions that pop up after their
changes.  In this case, the developer is no longer
around.  Also, this regression might be a 'we exposed a
hole in wine' rather than a plain old bug, so the fix
might mean writing a bunch of new code.

In this case, the previous version of the app works under
Wine, so perhaps that makes a fix less urgent.

Sometimes it helps to attract the attention of the
app's developer.  I'll ping them and see what they say,
maybe they can tell us where we're going wrong.

Occasionally one of the true hotshots (like AF) will
take an interest and diagnose the cause.  That
makes it a lot easier to fix, the cost to fix the bug
becomes much less uncertain, and if some company
needs the app to work, a paid fix becomes more
affordable at that point.  But even with that,
sometimes it's ages before the bug bubbles up
to the top of anyone's priorities.

I wish I had a better answer for you!
- Dan