On the Democratic Operation of Bugzilla

[Dan Shafer]

In another thread, Sarah Reichelt made the following observations
about Bugzilla in response to Xavier's complaints about stability of
2.7 on WinXP:

> I have looked at your list of reported bugs in Bugzilla. I find 126
> unfixed bugs reported by you (though some seem to be duplicates)
> however only 4 of them have any votes. Of those 4, 1 is rated as
> trivial, 2 as minor and only 1 as major. None of your bugs has been
> sufficiently important to get ANY votes from you. If you do not attach
> much importance to them and no-one else has felt them to be relevant
> enough for a vote, then the Rev development team probably thinks there
> are more important issues to concentrate on.

This provided me with an opportunity to say something I've been
meaning to say for some time but never had a "trigger" for.

While I am absolutely certain that RR doesn't rely solely or even
primarily on Bugzilla to set its bug-fixing agenda, I am equally sure
they do take it into account. And that's a shame because the reality
is that the number of people who use Rev regularly who: (a) are aware
of Bugzilla and its purpose; (b) have purused the bug list in an
effort to ferret out those that are most important to them and apply
votes to them; and (c) monitor it on an ongoing basis so they know
which bugs are being fixed and therefore where they can reapply their
votes is minuscule. I don't do that. I'm not sure how many others do.

If I create a new bug entry in Bugzilla, it would not even occur to me
to vote for it. By posting it and giving it a rating, I think I *am*
voting on it. Particularly given that I have a limited number of
points to allocate among bugs, I have to be judicious. (Until a few
months ago, I didn't even know I could change my votes around even
though it's perfectly clear from a close examination of the program
that you can do that.)

So I don't think the status of bugs in Bugzilla is an adequate
representation of the state of the product. I'm sure there are a ton
of suspected bugs that their discoverers never file because: (a)
they're not really sure they're bugs and confirming that would take
too much time; (b) they don't find Bugzilla a very welcoming
environment in which to post bugs (even with the wonderful Revzilla
around to take away a lot of the pain); and/or (c) they don't think
about it.

I'd be all for making Bugzilla far more useful. I even have some ideas
for how to do that. But frankly that's up to RunRev, not the
community, and my guess is that they have enough To Do Lists that they
don't need any more ideas from me!

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
http://www.shafermedia.com
Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
>From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html