Re: [gentoo-dev] Bug voting

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 18:24:48 -0400 Dylan Carlson <absinthe@g.o>
wrote:
| On Tuesday 27 July 2004 5:39 pm, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
| > I'd hardly call 30,000 emails and however many forums posts there
| > are"nothing".
| 
| Wasn't it you who called them the "vocal minority"?   

No, I said that that provided strong evidence that we do have a vocal
minority who go around demanding the latest x.x.x.1 releases, spamming
other distributions' IRC channels, using broken kernels and so on.

| Right, a completely isolated case.   As a package maintainer should
| know more than most users.  But ultimately, most bugs (that haven't
| been closed out as INVALID/etc) are either problems with the way
| something works now, or an enhancement request.   You think that votes
| get cast for stupid things?  Do you really think our users are stupid?

I think votes will get cast for trivial cosmetic features (example:
bootsplash) rather than the subtle can-make-your-system-die-horribly
bugs. So, for those kinds of bugs, we'll either have to ignore the
voting (which pretty much defeats the object of having votes at all) or
focus on the 'popular' enhancements at the expense of having a working
system.

| For developers such as yourself, what are you worried about?  Ignore
| the votes and keep working on your buglist like you normally would.  I
| fail to see the problem here.

I am worried that I will see posts saying "why are you ignoring the
several hundred votes on this bug?" on bugs for small cosmetic issues
(example: bootsplash) when there are far more important bugs which don't
attract votes. Although *I* will be ignoring the votes, the voters won't
be.

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