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Re: bugzilla voting
On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 11:24:59AM -0500, Scott Robert Ladd wrote:
> The value of voting directly corresponds to the amount of influence it
> has -- as per the last U.S. Presidential election, where the popular
> vote was overridden by judicial fiat. If people vote for bugs, they will
> quickly become disillusioned by Per's "*might* take votes into account
> occasionally" viewpoint.
There's also the factor that "voting" on the Internet is usually dominated
by organized efforts to stuff the ballot boxes (mailing lists and weblogs
urging people to go to a site they never read and vote a certain way in some
poll). That's why you'll see wild swings when, say, CNN puts up a poll
on a partisan issue: some popular right-wing blog might send its people there,
and then some other popular left-wing blog will do the same, etc.
> Please note that I am not criticizing Pers! A purely democratic approach
> won't work, either, as under such, the only bugs that would get fixed
> are those for very popular platforms.
In practice, factors that tend to dominate are neither voting nor money,
but whether a bug is easy to fix. If you have a bug, you can make it more
likely that it will get fixed by helping to make it easy to fix, by producing
a really good bug report. A good bug report is one that provides complete
information and a short testcase that reliably triggers the bug.
That's why folks like Wolfgang Bangerth, who specialize in producing reduced
test cases, are GCC heros.