Re: Enable voting on Bugzilla?

[Rob Adams <readams readams net>]

As long as I don't get an email with every vote, I don't really see any
reason why it would be harmful to have the possibility of voting.  One
piece of information that can be sometimes lacking is how many people
are affected by a particular problem.  Serious problems are typically
duped a large number of times, so these are easy to spot.  But sometimes
I worry that conscientious bugzilla users who diligently search for an
existing bug and find it already there have no way of reasonably
indicating that this is a problem that affects them as well.  This may
be especially problematic for possibly obscure issues like multihead,
pseudocolor, layout switching, accessiblity, etc. that typically affect
only a small subset of users, but are nonetheless important to fix.

On the other hand, as someone involved with metacity on a day-to-day
basis, I am all-too-familiar with the fact that sometimes decisions have
to be made that can be somewhat unpopular.  I'd hate to think how many
votes we'd have on edge flipping or no-focus-on-map preferences.  For
this reason, if such a system were to be implemented, I think that it
would be useful if voting were disabled on resolved or closed bugs.

I would prefer that we didn't call it "voting" per se.  A "metoo
counter" is perhaps more accurate.  But we do need to be quite explicit
that simply voting me too on a bug does not ensure that any particular
change will be made in the future.  With free software, the best way to
"vote" is with a patch.

Even if for a particular maintainer the voting is entirely ignored, it
gives people a widget to play with to feel like they've been noticed,
like the button for crosswalks at most intersections these days.

-Rob

On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 13:33 -0700, Ryan McDougall wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-03-13 at 21:11 +0100, Fernando Herrera wrote:
> > Sat, Mar 13, 2004 at 06:19:45PM +0000, Chris Howells escribió:
> > 
> > >Votes are used as a useful indicator for developers to judge what 
> > >bugs/features are most annoying/wanted, and to prioritise their time towards 
> > >those if they _want_.
> > 
> > 	What about the voting universe? Who is voting? Hackers? Advanced
> > users? People reading /.? Home users?
> > 
> > 	If the population voting is not homogenous with the real user
> > base results are not the real wishes of that user base, and they are
> > not accurate.
> > 
> > Salu2
> > 
> 
> The "universe" (ah set theory in a bugzilla discussion :)) of users are
> those who have taken the time to register themselves with a valid email
> on the bugzilla system, and thus generally represent the core of bug
> reporting users. You'd know this if you stopped by the KDE bugzilla, or
> read the link in the original post.
> 
> As someone familiar with mathematics, you should know that accuracy is a
> relative measure. Political polls use very strict statistics to arrive
> at very high accuracies given they only asked 0.01 percent of the voting
> population.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ryan
> 
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