Re: bug rating

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 02:15:21AM -0800, Mark Polesky wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
> 
> > Let me turn this around: you are one of our top 10 bug
> > hunters.  If you had no previous connection to any of the
> > issues, how would you decide which bug(s) to work on?  Would
> > you seriously just start working on whichever item *I* said
> > was most important / most annoying ?  or would you try to
> > find an item that appealed to *you* personally?
> 
> I think I side with Werner on this one.  There are 336 open
> issues in the tracker.  And something like #379, which most of
> us would agree looks hideous*, is given priority `low', while
> something like #887, which involves point-and-click of all
> things, is given priority `medium'.

Oooookkkaay.  379 is now medium.  887 is now low.  Nobody is
working on fixing them, but hey, as long as those deck chairs look
good, who cares which vertical direction the titanic is moving in!

(admittedly, both issues are marked as "started", which makes this
a very rare pair of issues indeed!)

> Personally, I don't think `priority'* or `annoying' captures
> it.  I would label them `embarrassing', because they're
> holding LilyPond back from looking really professional.

But if nobody is working on fixing them, who cares what the label
is?!?!

The low vs. medium priority has historically been a mixture of
"bug severity" and "order that somebody might try to fix it in".
If somebody wants to go through all 350 bugs that are low and
medium, and prioritize them according to "how ugly do they look",
I don't care.

Talking about this is SERIOUSLY in "rearranging the deck chairs
while the titanic sinks" territory (in case you didn't catch the
earlier reference).  I don't know of any bug fixers who are
sitting around twiddling their thumbs.  Instead, they're trying to
learn enough about the internals to fix the issue they're already
working on.

Cheers,
- Graham