Hi, folks. We in the QA and Bugzappers groups have recently been discussing the use of the Priority and Severity fields in Bugzilla. At present, the status is that these are more or less ignored by Bugzappers and most maintainers; some maintainers use and set them for their own packages according to their own system. The reason for their neglect, as we see it, is that there's been no convention for their use, and no overall responsibility in setting them - they're usually set arbitrarily by reporters, and thus convey no useful information. We think it may be useful for the Bugzappers group to start setting these fields as part of the triage process. To address one potential issue right off the top - this would be *entirely* advisory, like all the other work of the Bugzappers: it's intended to provide a service to maintainers, nothing more. It would not be in any way prescriptive - we don't want any other group to be able to tell maintainers what they should work on. We simply think that setting these fields consistently as part of triage might prove useful to some, or all, maintainers. It's also just proposed as a trial - if we try it and it doesn't seem to be working out well, we'll stop it. We have a draft convention for how these fields should be set here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Beland/Bugzilla_Legend#Severity_and_Priority . As you can see, it basically suggests that the severity field be used to rate the importance of the issue in the context only of the affected package, and priority be used to rate the importance of the issue in the context of the distribution as a whole. There is an alternative proposal that triagers would set only the severity field, which would work mostly as it does in the other proposal, except that the Urgent severity would be used for issues which, in the triager's judgement, have serious consequences for the distro as a whole. The priority field, in this proposal, is reserved for the package maintainer(s) to use, no-one else gets to set it at any point. In our proposals, triagers would set these field(s) in as consistent a manner as possible as part of the initial triage process. Bug reporters could be prevented from setting the fields at all, at any time, to address the possibility that they might just set their reports to High or Urgent regardless of their actual importance. There's no action required or even suggested of any maintainer for any value of either field - it's simply there to provide information. We feel that maintainers might then find it useful to organize their bugs by severity or priority to make it easier to identify the most urgent issues to address. A few specifics: the system would happily accommodate maintainers who have their own systems for using these fields. Triagers would be specifically instructed not to touch these fields if they had been previously touched by the maintainer - effectively, maintainer's decision on these fields is final. So if you disagree with the triager's opinion, or you have your own system for using these fields, you could simply set them to whatever you like and the Bugzappers will not change them back. So, really, we just want your feedback: do you think this proposal might prove useful to you as a maintainer? Can you see any problems with it, or potential refinements or improvements? Which of the two slightly differing proposals would you prefer? Bugzappers' mission is to ease the lives of maintainers, so we don't want to put this in place unless it's seen as beneficial by at least some maintainers. Thanks! Matěj on behalf of Fedora BugZappers -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
