On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 03:57:30PM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> > > 'reportbug' is right, one of grave's meanings is that the package is
> > > broken itself. Although if not everybody can reproduce that then it's
> > > not grave, as you say.
> >
> > And there's another reason why users shouldn't be prompted about severities
> > the way they are now -- they usually can't get the whole picture in order to
> > decide on these things.
>
> Hmm... well, maybe different types of users should get different types
> of severity prompts, with a default level of "luser" with very limited
> options and simpler explanations... however, the dictionary
> definitions of these severities are important to developers...
>
> Frankly I don't know what the best solution is... words like "grave"
> and "critical" are tempting to choose, but on the other hand power
> users and developers *do* know what they mean. 'bug' uses numbers
> instead of the real severity names, which might be an approach, but it
> treats the users as stupid, and I'm inclined against that.
>
> My gut feeling is that we let the users do the first level of bug
> triage, and then developers can agonize about reclassifying the < 5%
> they get wrong. I'd rather see 100x too many grave reports than let
> one slip through at "normal" because we put some artificial barrier in
> the way of bug reporting.
I'm suggesting that the program asks "Do you want to assign a special
severity, and if so, which?", instead of presenting a whole screen of
tempting descriptions that every luser will abuse. 5%[1] is too many when
there can be less than 5%, don't you think?
I'd rather if you wouldn't put us through the reclassifying -- no developer
should intentionally leave room for problems and then leave them for others
to fix...
[1] and that's just an assumption
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.
