Re: [gentoo-dev] Bug voting

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 14:18:55 -0400 Dylan Carlson <absinthe@g.o>
wrote:
| On Tuesday 27 July 2004 2:07 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| > Except that the voting will not be indicative of what our user base
| > actually wants. Instead, it will indicate the whim of a vocal
| > minority of Off The Wall posters and zealots from that IRC channel
| > I'm not allowed to talk about. Most of our users don't condone
| > join-flooding other distributions' channels on IRC. Most of our
| > users give at least a vague hoot about having a stable kernel and
| > filesystem. Most of our users would rather that their ebuilds
| > compiled, even if it meant missing out on the occasional x.x.x.1
| > release from upstream. However, most of those users won't be voting.
| 
| Those are assumptions, nothing more.

Those are assumptions based upon a very large amount of evidence
obtained from the forums, the -user mailing list and IRC. Like it or
not, we *do* have a small number of users who *do* going around
trolling, spamming and generally making a nuisance of themselves. You
really think that the aa-G aa-E thing is indicative of our user base?

| > We already have a good indication of how many people care about a
| > bug -- the length of the Cc: list usually works pretty well.
| 
| Really?  So you think that if we started measuring the CC lists that
| it wouldn't somehow be tainted by the "vocal minority" that would
| otherwise be voting?  Your logic is totally flawed.

No, I'm saying it's an indicator which already exists if someone wants
to find out how popular their bug might be, nothing more. However, Cc:
list spamming is pretty pointless, whereas vote spamming could be
construed to mean something.

| I frankly don't understand why you're so outspoken on this issue.  You
| can ignore votes if that's what you choose to do.  This is not a
| policy change proposal, this is an enhancement request for Bugzilla.  

1) Because it will lead to "this bug has over a hundred votes, why is
it being ignored?" posts.

2) Because it is yet another field in bugzilla. We already have far too
many clicky boxes for most people.

3) Because it will lead to vote spamming. Search the Off The Wall forum
for "portage ignorance" for a good example of why this won't work.

| Also please read: http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml

Posting irrelevant links does not make an argument.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Sparc, MIPS, Vim, Fluxbox)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm