Re: [gentoo-dev] Bug voting

[Jason Rhinelander <jason@gossamer-threads.com>]

Peter Johanson wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 01:27:29PM -0400, Dylan Carlson wrote:
> 
>>On Tuesday 27 July 2004 1:04 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>>
>>>Well, given that most of our users don't seem to be able to get the
>>>priority field straight ("Waah! There's a tiny typo in an einfo
>>>statement! BLOCKER!"), I'd be kind of sceptical about an easily rigged
>>>popularity contest. I suspect we'd just end up seeing thousands of votes
>>>for "add more pictures to bootsplash" and "add this horribly broken
>>>kernel patch to g-d-s"...
>>
>>That's a grim assessment.  In any case, it doesn't matter how someone 
>>spends their votes.  If many people spend votes for bootsplash, and 
>>bootsplash enhancements end up being a priority, then I would hope we 
>>would respond by incorporating them with the same priority as our own 
>>personal wishlists.
> 
> 
> I think the point (once you learn to decode ciaranm's acidic comments)
> is that this voting may result in a group of overly zealous users
> skewing things away from realistic priorities. We might see a bug about
> reiser4 support in g-d-s  get pumped up to the top of the list, where a
> bug about fixing a major but subtle flaw in base-layout might not get
> any attention. (just an example (one that ciaranm will i'm sure enjoy))
> 

Is that really a problem though?  Just because more people voted for A 
than B doesn't mean that the dev who chooses between the two has to do A 
- it simply provides a mode of input as to how many users want the 
feature.  When a dev knows that B is probably more important, he really 
isn't going to care that A got more votes - the voting only becomes a 
determining factor when similar ideas are considered.

On the other hand, there may well be many people who feel that votes == 
importance, and I think it ought to be made clear that this simply isn't 
the case - votes would serve as a way for people to say "me too" without 
actually cluttering up the bug report by typing "me too" into the 
comment box.

-- Jason Rhinelander
-- Gossamer Threads, Inc.

> None the less, i think enabling it warrants consideration.
> 
> -pete

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