Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Better define the meaning of the bugzilla severities and reduce t

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:27:06 +0200
Hi List!

To my experience, having three levels of severity is just enough to express all possible incoming bugs. This makes it a lot easier for the reporter to set this entry and won't really reduce the information of this field.

In addition to this an "enhancement" severity should be available for new feature requests and a "blocker" severity can be handy to raise the importance of an already existing entry to sort out things to be done before a release.

Everything more than this is just overkill and simply will complicating the handling and confuse the reporter.

So IMHO we should better define what the severities actually mean and slightly reduce the number of severities:

- a blocker bug is something security critical or something that generally will prevent working with common Ethereal functions (e.g. a crash while saving a libpcap capture file) for the majority of users --- this severity should only be set by a developer --- these bugs must be fixed before a new release

- a critical bug is something really annoying but probably less commonly appearing (e.g. a crash while saving to a special capture file format), or only appearing under special circumstances --- these bugs should be fixed before a new release

- a normal bug is something annoying like a wrong display of data or a function not working as expected

- a minor bug is something that could be fixed later as it's not that important (e.g. a typo in a label), inconsistent GUI elements, ...

- an enhancement is, well, an enhancement


An explanation page (like the current "Ethereal" vs. "Web sites" page) would be really nice :-)

Any comments on this?

Regards,ULFL