Severity levels

[Nicklas Börjesson]

As I wrote in my earlier post, Austin told me about the voting functionality, 
and If that is considered when priorities are made, it is likely to keep
things pretty on track, making my proposed changes far less important.
I still think my thoughts aren't that off anyway, but now they feel a
bit more "optional".

>No, he's proposing to dump the developer-focused severity completely,
>because "component + priority should be good enough", and replace it
>with ill-defined, ambiguous Low, Medium, High, Critical. Blockers and
>metabugs would also disappear under his proposed model, it seems.
>After all, what good are metabugs to users? ;)

Exactly. Ben's got it. :-)
But blockers and metabugs wouldn't disappear. 
They would only lose their special classification. 
They would likely have it's priorities set to 1 by the developer reviewing.
In what other way than they are highly prioritized are they different to any other bug?
Something that must be fixed, must be fixed, regardless.
To me, blocker is a class of bugs, not a level of severity. 
Mixing is up like is done now makes it:
a) more complicated for users. b) more difficult to severity in statistics.

>ill-defined
I would go further than I'll-defined. I'd say non-defined.

The other things I talked about, drifting away from usability is a 
fairly rapid process(a few years) that I actually have experienced first hand
(well second hand, actually), and it wasn't pretty. 
You joke about it, but the worst thing about it is that because it really only
needs such a small skew to happen, it creeps up on you.
Because "normal" get fixed far more often than "minor" bugs.

> Firefox and IE have drastically different success/failure/issues 
> when running in Wine, as do MS Word and
> WordPerfect 

Yep, but I'd rather put I it like a Microsoft application has often other problems than externally developed applications(built-in vs using dll:s for everything).

Anyway, looking at the forums now, games and 3d applications DO usually have different issues than normal desktop applications.
It's more about controllers, DirectX and other stuff. 
And there are a LOT of posts. 30 new threads the last 24 hours. Lot's to wade through I you're only into D3D issues.
If it was different lists, people could become a little bit more specialized.

//Nicklas