[phobos] Upping the number of bugzilla votes from 10 to 100

Andrei Alexandrescu andrei at erdani.com
Wed Dec 8 16:16:20 PST 2010


On 12/8/10 3:25 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Wednesday, December 08, 2010 15:03:43 Brad Roberts wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Dec 2010, Brad Roberts wrote:
>>> I don't think we have concensus (or even a majority) that suggests moving
>>> forward.  I think it does do harm.  I think it suggests that we pay
>>> attention to votes, when reality suggests more strongly that we don't.
>>>
>>> Fix the behavior first, imho.
>>
>> Summary so far:
>>
>> yes
>>   Andrei Alexandrescu
>>
>> alternate suggestion
>>   David Simcha
>>
>> no
>>   Brad Roberts
>>   Jesse Phillips
>>   Steve Schveighoffer
>>   Don Clugston
>
> I definitely like the idea of increasing the number of votes and making it
> possible to apply multiple votes to a bug. I definitely have more than 10 bugs
> that I'd like to vote on. But I do agree that there's little evidence that
> highly voted bugs get fixed. I don't think that I've ever had a bug that I've
> voted on fixed. And if the votes don't actually mean anything, then I'm not sure
> that there's much point in using them.
>
> So, I like the idea of increasing the vote count, but if it doesn't affect what
> gets fixed, then perhaps it would be better to just get rid of the voting
> entirely. Based on votes, I would have expected stuff like the fact that Object
> isn't const-correct to have been fixed ages ago. But there are a number of bugs
> which have been around for quite a while which have a number of votes on them
> and yet never get fiixed.

The idea is to indeed have votes affect what is being worked on; 
otherwise I wouldn't bother you all. My problem is that I now must pawn 
votes from some bug to another. But the larger issue is that with few 
votes per user and many opened bugs we have essentially a bimodal 
distribution, whereas with more votes per user we have a longer, 
smoother tail, which is more informative.

I don't really understand the stiff opposition to this. This is not the 
time and the place to criticize the past and present of our process, but 
instead to take steps to improve it. Part of improving the process, now 
that fixing bugs is a major focus, is to figure out a good ranking 
function for bugs. And I believe that increasing the number of votes per 
user would contribute to that. Could we please push this through? Let's 
make it happen.


Thanks,

Andrei


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