Bug voting? (in Bugzilla or whatever)

[Robin Green]

There was some discussion on the rhl-devel-list about how we can know
how many people want something / don't want something, given that
posters to a mailing list are likely to be unrepresentative of the
general userbase, for a variety of reasons.

Well, one thing that seemed to work for java.sun.com - as a means of
gauging demand - was allowing voting in their bug database. Although
the extent to which they actually listen to it is debatable.

I think it "worked" in their case because (a) they had a lot of
serious bugs(!) and missing features that people wanted, (b) they
have a vast number of users who are also developers and clued-in
enough to file a bug report / feature request.

Javasoft use a vote limit of 3 to prevent overvoting (one person
having undue influence). That seems a little small, but it certainly
forced voters to focus on their 3, or 2, or 1, most important bug(s).

I propose enabling voting for all users in the bug system (Bugzilla
or any future replacement thereof). Votes would obviously not be
binding, but they could be taken into account at Redhat's discretion.

The ability to vote against a bug/RFE[1] would also be useful to avoid
one-sided voting. (This is currently a RFE in bugzilla's own bugzilla
at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48570 .) Voting against
a feature would mean "I don't like this"; voting against a bug would
mean either "This isn't a bug" or "Too much important stuff which
assumes the existence of this bug would break, if this were fixed".

-- 
Robin

[1] RFE = Request For Enhancement, a slightly more general term than
"feature request"