On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 22:23 +0000, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
If at the moment the priority field neither necessarily triggers action nor reflects the actual state of affairs, why even bother and not just delete/hide it from view? This would free more time to fix bugs.
I don't see how dropping it all together helps planning or how it "frees more time". Obviously anybody is free to work on anything but some stuff simply is more important than other stuff. I understand that there are many options and ways to express that importance though, and that "severity", "priority", "target milestones", "blocker bugs" have some ambiguity to discuss in the long run. Right now I'd like to introduce a clear way to mark issues that should be handled immediately.
I think the priority field is important. And I sometimes use it for finding bugs to fix (or you know, did back when I had more free time and went around fixing random bugs).
What I would really like to see is banning users from touching the priority field. The field is made rather useless by bug reporters who feel their pet issue is the most important thing to ever happen - and suddenly there's a whole lot of issues at highest. Of course I would still like to see triaging people setting the field - just not the randoms who think by marking their bug highest priority it will actually be treated like highest priority.
Some of the suggestions mentioned earlier for priority meanings seem a bit inflated to me. At most times there's not a huge number of high priority issues (Limited person power = not everything can be fixed instantly) - Thus the field should be more distinguishing on the lower end of the spectrum. I personally think that the following would more reflect reality: lowest = nobody cares. If somebody cares they can fix it, and we won't stop them low = Not very important. Maybe one day if I'm very bored. If this issue never got fixed I wouldn't loose too much sleep Normal = Your average bug (Realizing that your average bug isn't very important). This should get fixed at some point. Doesn't have to be at next release - But if I was browsing Wikipedia 5 years from now I hope I don't encounter the issue High = This was kind of bad. Unless there is some very good reason we cannot, this should be fixed by next release. Preferably in the next month if it is not a large amount of work Highest = This is a major issue. Somebody should be working on this right now. If somebody sets this to high they should either be working on the issue, or working to find someone to fix the issue.
An alternative way of looking at priority, is instead of how long it should take to fix - look instead at how long it should take before somebody starts to look into/begin fixing the issue.
-bawolff