[rfc] bug handling priorities

Martin Pool mbp at canonical.com
Thu May 28 15:23:55 BST 2009


2009/5/28 Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>:

> I'm not volunteering<wink>, but you oughtta see if you can get
> bystanders like me to do user care.  Somebody like Brad Knowles on
> Mailman-Users would be super excellent (but hey, that would be like if
> you could get Larry McVoy to do user service for you, so don't set your
> sights quite that high).

Good point.

>
>  > The other is that explicitly marking bugs as "confirmed, low priority"
>  > has a low payoff, but detecting and acting on critical bugs has a high
>  > payoff.
>
> Excuse me, but to detect whether it's critical you gotta look at it.
> And as long as you're looking, why not tick the "low priority" box
> (whether or not you've confirmed it)?  (In fact, that sounds a lot
> like what you actually do, as described elsewhere in your post.)

Because for any bug tracker I've even heard of, marking the bug
'confirmed low' is slower than just deleting the mail.  However this
has the disadvantage that there's an explicit decision there is not
captured or shared with anyone else in the world, so you get N
developers reading the mail to decide it's unimportant.  (A bit of
redundancy may be beneficial so every picks up the gestalt.)

The other factor is that having gone into the bug tracker people are
going to be strongly inclined to look for dupes or clean it up, and
then you're talking about say a few minutes per unimportant bug rather
than less than seconds.

Better tool support for quickly filtering them might help.

>
>  > Saying "thanks for your bug", removing dupes before they
>  > proliferate, or getting more reproduction data while it's still fresh
>  > is somewhat useful, but on the whole I suspect users would rather get
>  > 1 bug fixed than be thanked 20 times.
>
> I agree with the "thanks" and "getting data", but linking dupes is
> much more important than either of those.

I agree.  If the bug is known to be never fixed it doesn't really
matter about the title, but seeing that something relatively trivial
is being commonly hit is interesting, so you do want to dedupe, and
that's closely related to tidying them up.

I believe Launchpad's soon getting a "more like these" feature for
finding dupes.

>  >  fixing critical bugs
>  >  >> making releases
>  >  >> reviewing or otherwise unblocking other developers
>  >  >> landing approved patches (possibly with tweaks or test fixes)
>  >  >> answering user questions
>
> Again, I think that for somebody who can do all the other tasks,
> answering user questions should be lower priority.  Somebody should be
> a "meta-developer", looking for people who can do these tasks.  You
> can often find somebody who's not in a position to make code
> contributions who's more than happy to to direct user questions to the
> right places.

People certainly do this on irc, maybe we can encourage them to do
this in answers and bugs?

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>



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