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

[Brad Roberts]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2010, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> 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

I guess a big part of my resistance is the past, so I'll try to set that 
asside for a moment.  Let's look at the real statistics:

total open bugs: 2186
bugs with at least one vote: 328 (15%)

votes  num bugs
  0    1858
  1    120
  2    59
  3    17
  4    6
  5    7
  6    4
  7    3
  9    1
 10    1
 12    2
 13    1
 16    2
 17    1
 19    2
 22    1
 42    1

What sort of curve are you looking for?  What percentage of bugs with 
votes?