Draft email to maintainers regarding Priority / Severity in Bugzilla

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 10:56:57AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:

 > the setting of these fields - they might disagree with a triager who set
 > their issue to Medium or Low, and set it higher. I've implemented
 > similar systems before and that hasn't been my experience - I've found
 > that reporters will often over-rate an issue on initial filing, but few
 > of them will ever re-rate it once it's been set by a triager or
 > maintainer. However, if this did prove to be a problem, there's a fairly
 > simple solution: just restrict the fields, so that only Bugzappers and
 > maintainers (and other usually empowered folks) can set them. That would
 > solve that issue, if necessary.
 > 
 > So, really, we just want your feedback: do you think this system might
 > prove useful to you as a maintainer? Can you see any problems with it,

A long time ago, I tried using it on kernel bugs for a while, and
gave up quickly.  If it remains user-setable, it's utterly useless.

Severity of a bug differs wildly between the people filing the bug
and the developer on the recieving end.  OMG MY SOUND DOESN'T WORK
might seem incredibly urgent that needs fixing asap to a user who
can't listen to his mp3s, but at the same time if someone else
files a data corruption bug, it's severity obviously trumps it.

The idea of triagers cleaning them up post-filing has two problems
minor: more bugspam in our mailboxes.
major: I tried lowering severity on bugs in the past, and got into
revert-wars with the bug filer. It quickly became obviously it's
easier to leave it 'urgent' and to just ignore the field.

The only way I see it ever being a useful field is if it
isn't visible to anyone but the person the bug is filed against
They after all, are the only people equipped with enough
information to determine how severe a bug is in context
with every other bug.

	Dave