Michael Segel wrote: > The point I'm trying to make is that if we look at JIRA there are over 300 > open issues and the classification of what is critical and what is a bug are > subjective.
I think that's very true and correct, in an open source project we have users directly entering issues, they enter issues according to their view of the world. If they are porting an application from some other database and need a feature, then it is critical to them. Of course, Derby developers (or anyone) is free to go in and modify a Jira entry to changes its type, priority etc. Any issue reported by a user and its priority are great feedback to people working on Derby, at least they are interesting to me: - for an bug entered that is not a bug, then it's potentially an indication of a problem somewhere, maybe in the Derby documentation. The fact that someone took time to enter it clearly means there is some issue with Derby, and that feedback can benefit Derby. - for the priority, it's good to see how other people view situations, seeing the other point of view is a great benefit of open source. Kind of, "Wow I never thought that could be a critical issue, but now I see what you are trying to do, I understand better." Again, understanding how others user Derby is feedback that benefits Derby. We do see that people forget to mark a Jira entry as a new feature or improvement, because the default is bug. Usually someone jumps in and changes the type, no real problem. > There needs to be guidelines. There are guidelines: http://db.apache.org/derby/DerbyBugGuidelines.html http://db.apache.org/derby/binaries/FilingDerbyIssuesInJira.doc The guidelines do address your pet peeve, people are encouraged to raise an issue on the list first, to see if what they are seeing is really a bug, I think most people do that. That's generally good advice for anything, if your are unsure about something, then don't quote it as fact on the list, instead raise the issue as a question, or 'I think XXX is the case, can someone confirm". I think this discussion is a great example of what I'm talking about, the database portability question did indeed lead to a bug, the fact that's it's not documented, so it caused confusion for users. Dan.
