Voting for bugs (Was: Re: [Bug 20969])

[Tom Spear]

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 2:38 AM, Dmitry Timoshkov <dmitry at codeweavers.com>wrote:

> Yaron Shahrabani <sh.yaron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think that voting for bugs is a great feature, otherwise there would
> have
> > been many annoying comments like: it happens to me too and what info you
> can
> > get out of it?
>
> Adding such a comment is pefectly acceptable.
>
> Confirming a bug and voting for it are two different things. Once a bug is
> confirmed its state changes from UNCONFORMED to NEW, and usually once
> sombody
> else bisides the reporter confirms a bug, a person with appropriate
> bugzilla
> rights sets bug state to NEW. But asking people to vote for a bug is a
> waste
> of effort, since that doesn't change anything. There are bugs in Wine
> bugzilla
> with huge amounts of votes on them, but that doesn't suddenly make a bug
> more
> important to developers for various reasons.
>
> > Voting helps setting priorities for bugs without nonsense comments.
>
> That's the bug severity is for.
>
> --
> Dmitry.
>
>
>
My point in making the statement is that voting for the bug should confirm
the bug once a certain threshold has been reached.

People other than the reporter making a comment that a bug occurs for them
too doesn't necessarily make the bug valid, and certainly doesn't change
it's status.
There are bugzilla installs for other projects, IIRC, that do change the
status of bugs from UNCONFIRMED to NEW once there have been several votes,
which helps the developers in terms of how much time they spend doing what
they like (coding) vs doing maintenance (marking bugs as invalid).

Being that the only way I can contribute to the project is by helping out in
the bugzilla, since I have almost no programming experience, I was not
certain that it was a valid bug since I cannot reproduce it using the
reporter's exact same steps. So even though I have the ability to confirm
bugs, I did not want to do so in case it was actually an INVALID.