Re: Enable voting on Bugzilla?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 10:10:30PM -0700 or thereabouts, Ryan McDougall wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 22:53 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > I continue to think it's a bad idea. "Me too" comments are always on the
> > most idiot bugs that least need "me too" comments, and voting is surely
> > the same basic thing as a "me too" comment.
> 
> I don't think voting is a me too statement, I think its a vote. 

But why else would you vote? 

> Granted I haven't used KDE's system, but there is no fundamental reason
> why voting has to get in the developer's way. It'd be just another
> indexable field. Developers would be free to tackle popular bugs and win
> the adoration of many, or free to ignore populist dead-ends and provide
> bold leadership. 
> 
> Either way the actual decision process remains the same. If anything it
> lets people feel a greater sense of participation in the community that
> doesn't involve technicalities such as code.

Do you remember the bug whereby installing AbiWord messed up
your fonts in other applications? AbiSource had a bugzilla with
voting turned on, and the results are at 

  http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1030

And here are some quotes from the discussion.

  * 24 votes. Why is this bug in submitted state? Opening.
  * If a bug has twice as many open bugs as any other open bug,
    doesn't that suggest it should be moved up the priority list 
    just a smidgen? Alternately, if voting doesn't actually mean 
    anything, doesn't it give users the incorrect impression that 
    their voices will or should be heard?
  * Just chiming in to say that this bug is very much a priority 
    for abiword developers. We really want to solve this, and our 
    proposed solution (use freetype) just won't be able to be 
    implemented before our 1.0 release. Sorry.
  * As of now, this bug has 322 votes. [...] What are you people doing ?!

So I do think that voting can get in the way: not only were
the number of votes held up as an example of the severity but
the developers ended up having to justify why the fix wasn't
done yet. 

Given the bug (which was a pain, and like many people I
just removed AbiWord as routine to avoid it), I think there
would have been an element of "what are you people doing?"
anyway, but the votes certainly didn't help. I think they
made it worse, because people assumed that voting would
change something. And it didn't seem to. It just raised
the temperature.

And when it comes to metacity and bugs like 
    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115072
and situations like "it looks like bug 102209 and this
one can't be simultaneously fixed--fixing one would mean 
breaking the other" then I can imagine all manner of 
canvassing for votes going on. "Which do you want fixed?"

Finally, I already see many comments about "This bug has
been open since... and you people obviously don't care"
or third-party comments on IRC and mailing lists to the
effect of "No, I won't file a bug. I filed one before and
nothing happened, so why should I file another?". 

If voting was added, I think this would just get worse. 
It would be another addition. "People voted for it, and
still nothing happened!"

Telsa