See:
http://blogs.testbit.eu/timj/2010/09/09/09-09-2010-request-to-support-voting-in-gnome-bugzilla/ (page moved)
These days I often have a hard time to keep up with the tasks on my TODO lists, but I do manage to sneak in a spare hour here or there to look into code I authored sometime ago and that’s waiting for maintenance attention. For projects like Gtk+/GLib it’s incredibly hard to figure a good start and order for bug processing if time is sparse and the number of bugs is flooding you.
Other projects on the net use issue trackers that support user voting of individual requests, here are two examples:
Of course I do realize that we have priority and severity fields in GNOME Bugzilla, but those are for a different purpose than polling the public opinion on which bugs should be fixed best/next, or which bugs have the largest pain impact on our user base.
At least for me, a publicly open voting system for GNOME Bugs would be immensely useful to judge where it’s best to concentrate my development efforts.
12 Comments
launchpad has “affects XX people” and you can add yourself to that =)
You have the CC, counting the ammount of people on CC you have a sense of priority I would say.
No, CC is for people who are willing to actively participate in the bug resolution process. You cannot sort by CC counts and it cannot be used for *public* polling. Take a look at other Bug trackers on the net, interesting bugs have very high votes, but not CC lists.
What about using Flattr for this? It would be great to make a plugin to integrate Bugzilla with Flattr :)
Disclaimer: it seems I’m not the first one with a similar idea! ( http://identi.ca/notice/46175489 )
Amount of duplicates is half of a workaroind, but I wouldn’t want to advertise it. :)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/duplicates.cgi?product=gtk%2B&openonly=1
Flattr sounds like a cool idea to create some funding, but I’m afraid that as soon as money is involved, people would feel ripped off if a bug or enhancement request with many Flattr hits gets ignored. That may result in quite a lot of pressure on developers, who may have other priorities.
Yeah,
The current problem is that you can not search bugs for numbers of CC’s and GNOME Bugzilla doesn’t have votes. So the maintainers can’t know what are the bugs that affects more people.
So I think the vote system is the less evil solution. Other posibility would be a vote system where only the maintainer can know the number of votes of each bug.
Very much needed feature indeed. I like also the idea of flattr, but it should be lower-priority.
Ironically, this very bug (#629161 – https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629161 ) has a number of WONTFIX duplicates as well ;)
“Take a look at other Bug trackers on the net, interesting bugs have very high votes, but not CC lists.” — Tim Janik
Like at google code where “staring an issue” implies CCing it.
The Flattr money should only be paid out when the bug is fixed.
The reason why GNOME disabled votes is that votes are of no importance to usual development, plus it’s too easy to stuff them (by eg posting a link to lwn, slashdot or even a blog). Also, I fear this would end up being as useful as http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/
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