Severity levels

[Austin English]

2009/5/3 Nicklas Börjesson <Nicklas.Borjesson at ws.se>:
>>Why should there be multiple support forums?
>
> Well, not forums, but as I said different lists for different kinds
> of applications(games/business/graphics), since they should(?) have related problems.
> I would think so, anyway.

The forums seem to serve this well as is.

>>The wiki has _a lot_ of info, most of the time when bugs are closed invalid,
>>wiki links are given to fix the problem. Again, wine _is_ an open source project.
>> If the wiki isn't good enough, add something.
>
> I am talking about avoiding a bug being submitted at all.
> Maybe to organize how-to-run information.
> Sure I could do a bit of that. It's like the idea you had about getting funding,
> did they tell you to go do it all by yourself?

http://appdb.winehq.org ?

>>How do you mean their priorities are important? It's an uncomfortable
>>truth, but users priorities aren't important, like has been said
>>dozens of times. Sure, we care about user's bugs, and want to fix
>>them.
> ...
> Users priorities probably affect what severity level they choose.
> But as I said to Ken, I can't believe that all users are morons.
> Anyway, regardless of their motives, I still think that they have to be included.

It doesn't affect anything, so there is no point. We can give every
user a gold star and say "yes, it's our highest priority", but it
doesn't do anything, so _there is no_ point.

> If not, the project will slowly drift away and turn into a toy nobody have any use for.

I highly doubt Wine is going to become irrelevant because users have
their bugs reassigned from critical to normal...

>>But every user also thinks *their* app is the most important
>>application to fix.
>
> Actually, I can't believe they all are that way.

Again, you may not think it, but I've been triaging bugs for 3 years,
so I know what does happen.

>>Wine can't stop development on _everything_ just to get one user's
>>application running. Making user's arbitrary priorities the most
>>important would be doing this.
>
> Good thing I didn't propose that then. :-)
> I said it should be a part of the priority and a considerable one. Not the largest one.
> And I am not talking about users arbitrary priorities, just including
> more intuitive severity levels(good or bad) when making bug fixing priorities.

I think this argument is circular...Wine has no shortage of bugs being
reported, we have plenty of new users reporting bugs, and new
developers contributing often. You're proposing adding an extra
severity rating that no developer will look at, and will only add to
confusion (users now have to decide *two* levels rather than one). It
won't add any benefit, other than possibly giving users a warm fuzzy
feeling that their bug is 'important' to them (which they can already
do with voting), but adds confusion, wasted time, and wasted effort.

-- 
-Austin