Severity levels

[Ben Klein]

2009/5/4 Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com>:
> 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.

That would be the case if *everyone* who *ever* produced software
banded together and established a one-way-to-do-one-thing API set.
Doesn't happen that way. Firefox and IE have drastically different
success/failure/issues when running in Wine, as do MS Word and
WordPerfect (I bet you thought I was going to say OOWriter!)

> The forums seem to serve this well as is.

Also AppDB has a browse feature, and lists bugs that apply to each
application (when moderated correctly).

>>>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.

By making the bug reporting system more confusing?

>> 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.

User priorities do not affect which bug should be examined first. All
bugs are created equal (and some bugs are more equal than others).

Not really the case there, but all bugs of each severity (this is
developer-side severity) are created equal and should be treated as
such.

> 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...

You'd be surprised! Releases will stop, AJ will quit citing user
unfriendliness, the Earth will spin off its axis and throw everyone
save John Smith from Liverpool out in to space, and so forth, all
because MY BUG WAS REDUCED FROM CRITICAL TO NORMAL! It's critical to
me, so why is it not critical to the developers?

</sarcasm>

>>>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.

Maybe you should have said "the average user" instead of "every user",
but it's true. If we leave the severity level up to the user, we'll
get a whole lot of Critical bugs being submitted that aren't critical
on the developer's side.

>>>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.

So where should it sit exactly? In between "how long will this take to
code" and "how many apps does this effect"? Should it be higher than
"is there a simple, *correct* way to fix this"?

>> And I am not talking about users arbitrary priorities, just including
>> more intuitive severity levels(good or bad) when making bug fixing priorities.

So, you mean allow the users to arbitrarily select whether THEY think
their bug should have a high priority or not?

> 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).

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? ;)

> 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.

+1