On 11/01/2013 12:07 AM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
It would take an awful lot of empathy for that person to understand
where we are coming from. Chances are, their reaction will be "well,
that will teach me to ever do that again", and then poof, they're gone.
I don't think it's much of a stretch to apply our lessons about
Wikipedia editor behavior to our bug tracker. We should be very careful
to come up with processes that don't unintentionally turn away bug
reporters.
I prefer setting things to "lowest" and then making a practice of
querying around it. In my experience, 90% of the bugs that bug janitors
want to set to "WONTFIX" are really actually lowest priority by Matt's
description. Admittedly, the difference between "WONTFIX" and "Lowest"
priority may be negligible from a reporter retention perspective, but I
think a very low priority still provides hope that one day, someone will
fix it, whereas there's a certain finality to "WONTFIX" that seems
especially offputting.
From my perspective, then, those 90% should indeed by filed as LOWEST.
I prefer to be straightforward. When I close a bug (as WONTFIX or
otherwise), I do try to explain why, which I think helps with the
empathy side.
I don't really think it's empathetic or straightforward to leave a
WONTFIX open. That only leads to people wasting their time asking, "Why
hasn't anyone even looked at this bug?
I should add that another WONTFIX reason is that it is unavoidably
incompatible with the existing code, either technically or from a UX
point of view.
If this is a serious concern, we could look at more nuanced close
reasons, such as Declined (e.g. makes the UX worse) (though this is
perhaps somewhat similar to Works For Me), Not Feasible (unavoidable
technical obstacles), Out of Scope (etc.).
I agree the all caps isn't really necessary. It's also important to
note that bugs can always be re-opened if a commenter points out a
legitimate reason. That is not to say that edit warring is useful, though.
Matt Flaschen
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