Bugzilla statistics

There are far better ways to get a bug "prioritized" than a voting system. If you can't provide arguments in the bug-reports comment fields that will convince the developers, then no voting system is going to help you.

When reporting a bug, or commenting on an existing one, provide use cases and arguments for why this bug should be fixed and why it is so important. A voting system can never be representative of the community/targetted use-base as a whole. What do you expect? "Hey, 1000 people have voted for this bug, you damn developers should fix it!!" (There are probably a couple of million GNOME-users out there...)

Basically because voting is useless. This has been covered on the mailing lists in the past. Iain summarizes it nicely in this March 2004 post:

1. It gives the small set of people who complain about stuff the belief that they are in charge, and then the right to bitch when their demands are not being met.
2. The majority do not always know what is correct or better
3. What does 1300 votes on something mean? 1300 people looked through a feature list and thought "Hmm, I'd like that one"
   "Oh, and I'd like that one too"
   "And that one..."
   "Ohhhhh, that sounds like a nice idea"
   It is a meaningless statistic.
4. It is unneeded. All major bugs can be noticed as such and should be fixed whether 1300 people have come across it or 1 person has come across it.

So while it might look like something useful, it doesn't do anything, and "it can't hurt" doesn't seem like a good reason for having it.

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From the same desktop-devel thread, here's Bugmeister Luis Villas take on bug voting:

I don't really want to go into it in depth, but basically voting in bugzillas is nothing but a way for people to whine about their favorite bugs in blogs, or on /., or on whatever other forum, and get people to stuff the 'voting box.' Votes end up having no bearing on actual bug validity, importance, or severity. If you need your bug marked up, argue persuasively in the bug that the bug has a serious user impact, or provide a patch. That's it.

xxxxxx

More from the same thread:

The damage is in giving people the impression votes matter. If the policy is 'bugs get fixed through merit-based prioritization or patches' and then 1300 people vote for a bug, guess what... those 1300 people start complaining that their votes are being ignored. For which I wouldn't blame them- either votes should matter, or they shouldn't be collected at all.

> either votes should matter, or they shouldn't be collected at all

Interestingly there is a desktop environment, KDE, where votes *do* matter (as in influencing priorities of developers fixing bugs or implementing features). I'm not aware of bad effects (like people complaining or whatever horror scenario you draw above).

have you looked at a typical KDE preference window lately?

A bugfix doesn't lead to a new preference option, most feature requests don't. What's your point?

Except for the millions of bugzilla bugs that are feature requests...

leads to design by committee.

All good points, though I thought there were some good points for enabling voting as well, such as the post from Rob. Of course, it looks like the majority was against the idea.

Agreed, many thanks to all involved in making Gnome better for everyone.

Some corrections, though:
Four of the people from the list are employed by Red Hat. Bastien Nocera (hadess hadess net) and Daniel Veillard (daniel veillard com) just don't use @redhat email addresses for their accounts in bugzilla.

This list is not for bug fixing but bug closing. If someone went and marked 1000 duplicates but didn't fix any bugs, they'd be on this list. (Of course, the people in this list happen to have fixed an awful lot of bugs as well, but the numbers in this list don't measure that)