Bug Importance Guidelines

[Brian Murray]

The current guidelines[0] for setting bug importance were written at at
time when there were not other ways, release targetting and milestones,
for identifying the importance of a bug to the distribution as a whole.
Subsequently, these guidelines use phrases like 'severe impact on a
small portion of Ubuntu users', 'moderate impact on a large portion of
Ubuntu users' and 'severe impact on a large portion of Ubuntu users'.
Since the release team is actively using milestones combined with
release targetting and measuring the quantity of users impacted is vague
and subjective - I believe that the importance of a bug should be
determined based on the impact for the package affected.

This would change the definition of High and Critical and the following
is what I have in mind for new guidelines.

 * '''High''': A bug which fulfills one of the following criteria:
  * is a reproducible crash report
  * affects the core functionality of the package
  * a problem with an essential hardware component (disk controller,
    laptop built-in wireless, video card, keyboard, mouse)
   
 * '''Critical''': A bug which fulfills one of the following criteria:
  * causes a package fail to install or upgrade 
  * causes a package to fail to build
  * causes a loss of data
  * causes a severe memory leak
  * makes the package unusable e.g. application fails to start or
    perform its primary function

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Importance

-- 
Brian Murray                                                 @ubuntu.com
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