Subject: Re: Tracking Prevalance of Bugs
To: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
From: Erik Bertelsen <erik@mediator.uni-c.dk>
List: current-users
Date: 05/07/1999 21:44:53
On Sun, May 02, 1999 at 06:02:03PM -0400, Curt Sampson wrote:
> 
> One of the things I've realised during the release process for 1.4
> is that we don't really have a way of tracking how many people are
> affected or likely to be affected by a particular bug. 
> 
> This is important information because it's used in decisions about

In old pre-historic days, when I worked with Control Data systems
(Cyber series machines), they made their bug report database (PSR's)
available to customers, where you could search and report entries
in the database (much like the Web interface to NetBSD's PR database,
just via X.25 and with a CLI interface....).

They had one interesting feature, that you might consider: you could
log a prioritized interest in a given PSR without having to submit
a new one. When reviewing a given bug report, the reader could also
see who in addition to the original submitter had declared an interest
in the PSR (and with what priority).

On the NetBSD web pages, when displaying the full text of a PR, I
could easily see the usability of having a button to add a declaration
of interest, e.g. with a priority, and possibly a note field.
This may, however, require changes to gnats (which I don't know much
about). Priorities should probably also include "negative" priorities,
saying that I don't consider this problem (or its proposed solution)
a good/important one.

- Erik

- Erik