Any guideline about severity of bugs?

[RazvanN]

On Monday, 18 July 2022 at 11:28:52 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> Apart from regressions being considered the worst bugs, I don't 
> know of any guideline on evaluating a severity of a bug I'm 
> reporting. I feel this is a problem. Because everyone has a 
> different perception of what consitutes, for example, a "major" 
> bug, this means that two bug reports about the same issue may 
> differ by multiple severity levels.
>
> For example, my personal rule has long been "if the compiler 
> crashes from using a vanilla, or soon-vanilla (DIP1000) 
> language feature, it's automatically critical". But some report 
> those issues [as 
> "normal"](https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19932). I 
> don't know which is right, and I don't think anyone else knows 
> either.
>
> This means that those who are bold with assigning severity 
> levels get more attenton than those who downplay their bugs 
> severity for fear of dramamongering accusations, or something. 
> Also it's hard to override the severity of bug reports of 
> others even when I feel it's wrong, when there is no guideline 
> to say which interpretation is right.
>
> Are there any guidelines that I'm not aware of? If not, I think 
> they should be laid down. It does not need to be anything 
> complex, just several rules and examples to get us started.

Hi Dukc,

I spend some time looking through bugs and sorting them. I am 
using some guidelines and I try to be consistent with them, but 
these are my own criteria so take them with a grain of salt.


Enhancement - I use this tag for bug reports that propose a new 
feature or a new extension for an existing feature. So if 
something is proposed but is not covered by the spec, I tag that 
as an enhancement.

Trivial - I use this tag for bug reports where I can evaluate 
that the fix is indeed trivial; for example: a typo in an error 
message, request for fully qualified name for a symbol in an 
error message, adding documentation etc.

Minor - I haven't used this tag ever and I would advocate for 
removing it. In theory, this tag should be used for bug reports 
where the behavior is wrong, but but the outcome is something 
that you can live with. Typically, when the compiler issues an 
error message that is not quite indicative of the problem you 
could tag that error as being minor. :-?

Normal - this is how most of the bugs should be tagged.

Major - this is used for bugs that affect a lot of code but for 
which there exists a work around. Typically, I use the major tag 
for bugs that are reported by industry players.

Critical - ICEs

Blocker - Major issues that have no workarounds

Regression - speaks for itself.

As for when fixing bugs, indeed I look at regressions first and 
then at criticals and blockers.

Hope this helps,
RazvanN