Bug 37056

Summary:	Bug Severity Lists are unspecific when dealing with documentation and user interface bugs
Product:	Gentoo Infrastructure	Reporter:	M. Creidieki Crouch <creidieki+gentoobugs>
Component:	Bugzilla	Assignee:	Benjamin Coles <sj7trunks>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description M. Creidieki Crouch 2004-01-02 15:34:11 UTC

The lists of "severities" for Gentoo bugzilla bugs seem to be designed for bugs which crash programs, do not provide needed functionality, etc. It is difficult to know how to grade the severity of user interface related bugs and documentation-related bugs. 

I rarely know whether the user-interface issues I report are "minor", "normal", or even "major" bugs. Even sizeable problems are often downgraded to "Trivial" by the maintainers. It is hard to argue against these decisions, because the descriptions of severities give little information.

"Misspellings" are listed as "trivial" in the description. But what about error messages that give no information on how to fix the problem? Incomplete, or even misleading, "man" pages?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1 Benjamin Coles 2004-01-14 21:17:27 UTC

in any bugzilla installation they all make minor comments on them and the developers end up changing status because it wasn't really that. Major would be like the whole system crashes. In all bugs accounts I have I never change the severity, I merely check back on it and see if someone did something about it, if no one does anything I might write the developer and see whats up. I checked the guided bug where it comments on that, it seems enough for any developer, but as a user it would take some getting used to until you start getting used to it.