Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

[TK009]

Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 17:44 +0200, Matej Cepl wrote:
>   
>> On 2009-04-20, 20:34 GMT, Jerry Amundson wrote:
>>     
>>> Severity is used to describe how bad a bug is for the reporter, 
>>> in the context of the specific component:
>>> * Urgent: Software is completely unusable, loses data, or the RPM
>>> won't update properly. Frequent or commonly encountered crashes.
>>>       
>> I know that I might add here something which isn't in the 
>> official definition, but I would suggest this slightly different 
>> definition of severity (gained practice in evaluting it when 
>> I was a lawyer for one huge software company in the Czech 
>> republic):
>>
>> the difference between Urgent and High, is that High makes THE 
>> PROGRAM IN QUESTION unsusable, Urgent makes WHOLE SYSTEM unusable 
>> (or it is a security bug).
>>
>> Medium than means ... it is real bug, but with possible 
>> workarounds or at least part of the program is still usable.
>>
>> Low is the rest.
>>     
>
> OK, so I spoke to Matej about this proposal on IRC, and we agreed to
> post a summary to the list for discussion. So!
>
> We now have two Proposals, Proposal A and Proposal B.
>
> Proposal A is more or less what's on the current draft Wiki page. The
> salient features are that triagers would set both priority and severity
> initially (maintainers would have final word on both). Severity would
> indicate how severe the issue is only within the context of the package
> itself - crasher is urgent, typo is low, etc. Priority would indicate
> how urgent (in the triager's judgment, initially, later in the
> packager's judgment) it is that the issue be fixed - which involves
> judging how important the issue is in the context of Fedora as a whole.
>
> Proposal B is Matej's idea. In this proposal, triagers would set only
> severity when triaging a bug; they would not touch priority. Severity
> would work more or less like in Proposal A, except that Urgent would be
> reserved for issues which have a significant impact on Fedora *as a
> whole* - say, a bug in initscripts which makes the system fail to boot
> at all, or something. Issues that are important in the context of the
> package but don't have any wider implications - say, a bug that causes
> Firefox to crash, but doesn't break anything else - would be High, they
> could not be Urgent.
>
> In Proposal B, priority would be reserved to maintainers for use however
> they feel appropriate.
>
> So, those are the two ideas. What do people think? Personally I can see
> the benefits of Matej's approach - it involves fewer grey areas and may
> make maintainers feel less like their toes are being trodden on - but I
> feel it loses us rather a lot of granularity. So I'm kinda on the fence.
> At present I'm leaning towards presenting both options to the developers
> to see what they like, but input welcome!
>   
My thoughts were that triagers would only set the severity/priority or 
prop B only severity on a bug that that will be assigned.  NEEDINFO flag 
isn't a reason to change those fields.

TK009