Severity levels

[Austin English]

2009/5/3 Nicklas Börjesson <Nicklas.Borjesson at ws.se>:
>> You'd be surprised...
> We'll I've looked around at "invalids", but to me it seems that people in general(with a few exceptions of course), tries quite hard until they file a bug report.
> At least way harder than they do in other FOSS projects I have been involved in, so I can't really say that I would think you've got a problem.
> At least not yet. Despite the support forum only have one list. More stuff on the wiki would help too.

Why should there be multiple support forums? 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.


> What I am talking about the fact that the ordinary users priorities are very important.
> Currently they are either:
> 1.Completely disregarded or
> 2. If they follow the instruction(where "commons sense" is not mentioned), they're forced to adhere to severity levels that distort or hide their opinion of the problem. And for each user reporting there are dozens that are not. Bad will.

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. But every user also thinks *their* app is the most important
application to fix. I regularly change around 3-5 bugs _a day_ that
are marked critical, because their favorite app XYZ doesn't run. A
good portion of that time, the bug is invalid, because they forgot a
runtime, e.g., the application didn't bundle msvcrt80 or the like.

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.

> It just feels like the entire project should become a bit more user-centric.
> Now I am not just talking about shinier graphics but about attitude.
> Maybe soften up a bit ask oneself, "WHY did this person ask this stupid question?", "WHY did he do this EVEN though it says do this?" or "How would I feel if someone said this to me?".

No disagreement there. Most developers do have a friendly attitude
towards users. If they don't, e-mail them in private, with a copy of
what they said and ask them to be more civil.

I'd encourage you to subscribe to wine-bugs for a while. Look how much
mail/bugs we go through, and you'll quickly see why time to hold every
users hand and fix _their_ most important bug is impossible.

-- 
-Austin