On 6/11/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, I have mixed feelings with this new effort to give a new lease of life to the bugzilla votes. Previously the votes on bugs were dismissed with a "we do what we want because we are volunteers". It is encouraging that the votes are looked at again, but has something really changed, the developers are still volunteers and they can as easily dismiss the votes as they have done in the past. It makes no difference who does the asking, there are bugs where Jimbo, Anthere and Angela all asked for a particular bug to be fixed.. to no avail.. And indeed why would such a request be honoured; the developers are volunteers ..
Well votes will always be dismissed to a certain degree for the reasons you cited, however with the previous system when I did look at it I felt that, like Tim said (paraphrased) I didn't get a number with much relation to anything. Whereas now I can see that X people found bug Y important enough to vote for it, which for me says alot more than a bug with 2000 votes which could be the result of two people voting for it with their maximum of 1000 votes or 20 people voting with 100 votes.
In the past you had many votes to give away but they were a finite resource. When a bug was given a massive amount of votes by one person it meant that the request was really important. Now a person can give only one vote for one bug. The developer can still say "I am a volunteer and I will do bug X in stead".
Of course, and that will never ever change as long as you have volunteers, no matter good your vote system you have, note however that some of us(1) do like helping people out and at least take these votes in as a factor when deciding what to work on.
1. Not meant as some lame attack on anyone else working on develoment.