Re: GOP-PROP 8: issue priorities

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 07:48:12AM +0000, Keith OHara wrote:
> 
> I'm curious first what we want the "priority" field to mean.

Ding ding, I think we have a winner.  That sentence is the crux of
the whole thing.

> Probably we do not mean literally the priority with which contributors will 
> give attention to the bugs, because contributors are volunteers driven by 
> individual interest.
> 
> I suggest the field is really a categorization to help contributors decide 
> what 
> to give attention to.

Yes.  And with that view, I think it's worth emphasizing "hinders
development" issues.

It's easy to see improvements in graphical output.  It's highly
visible, users praise (good) changes, etc.  By comparison, look at
"GUB regtest produces a random 'unbound open-file' in regtests"
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1248

People looking at the regtests simply have to remember that they
should ignore warning messages about 'unbound open-file'.  If we
have new people working on this -- say, James to check bugs, or
any replacement to Phil or James when they decide that their time
is better spent training a replacement and working on more
sophisticated stuff -- they need to teach their replacement to
ignore 'unbound open-file' warnings, but take other warnings
seriously.

Now, this is not a huge inconvenience... but having this floating
around for a year (I didn't bother adding it to the tracker when I
first noticed it) is an annoyance to people checking regtests.  It
sends the message that programmers don't care about the helpful
users volunteering to check regtests.

That's not the message I think we should be sending to each other.

> > Priority-medium:
> > 
> >     * highest level for graphical output problems
> 
> Simply for public relations, I suggest swapping "High" and "Medium".  We will 
> be just as motivated to solve development-hindering problems if they are 
> called 
> Medium.

Take a look at issues with label:maintainability.  I submit to you
that there is extremely little interest in fixing those issues.
:(


> I suggest that "Postponed" can mean "we're not quite sure what a proper fix 
> would look like, yet".  Then we know to give this issue a different kind of 
> attention, like looking in the textbooks, before we start coding.

I like that idea!

Cheers,
- Graham