Re: GOP-PROP 8: issue priorities

[Keith OHara]

On Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:42:55 -0700, Graham Percival <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.
[...]
> The more that I think about it, the more I like this
> interpretation of the Priority field.

What interpretation is that, exactly?

I suspect Graham meant "order in which to best keep the project moving".
Since the project doesn't control the order in which contributors attack issues, that 
would really be "order in which the project encourages contributors to attack 
issues".

But any interpretation of "priority" in the sense of "importance" seems 
useless.  We differ quite a lot in our opinions of importance.  I suspect Janek and I would rank 
issues in near-opposite order of importance.  That means that any importance-type priority 
estimated by the contributor who opens the issue, won't really help other contributors decide what 
to work on next.

Probably, however, we would all sort issues into roughly the same types of 
problems:
Regressions, crashes, incorrect output, ugly output, things that get in the way 
of contributing, ...

So, all we really need to do is make useful classifications, and admit that we 
won't all agree on their relative priorities.

Users and new contributors will interpret priority as importance, though, and 
will naturally want their favorites to be higher on the list.
That's why I suggested putting issues where we don't know exactly what Lilypond should 
do, as "Postponed".  Obviously we can't program the behavior until we know what 
we want it to be, and that motivates users (who might know their area of notation better 
than we do) to think through what they want.