Introducing time wasters

Andrew Dinn adinn at redhat.com
Thu Sep 20 14:34:06 UTC 2018


Hi Volker/Roman,

On 20/09/18 15:17, Volker Simonis wrote:
> maybe there's a little misunderstanding here? As I understand it, If
> you open a bug and I flag it as "timewaster", that doesn't mean that I
> think fixing that bug would be a waste of time nor does it mean that I
> pretend my time is more valuable than yours. It only means that I lost
> a lot of time searching for a similar problem and in the end I
> detected that you already found it and there's already a bug for it.
> In some sense the flag can be seen as a frequency counter for how
> often a problem occurs.

Well, I almost posted this this morning ... so here goes. I think there
is a not-so-little misunderstanding here that we need to avoid.

The point of this tag is to emphasise that the bug is costly in
developer time while it remains present i.e. that it is a priority to
fix this.

That's precisely the opposite of what the tag will suggest to many
native English speakers (and some non-native ones, too,it seems) who
will read it as saying

  "this bug is not worth fixing and ought to be ignored -- probably
because it was raised by someone who has nary a clue as to what is involved"

I'm quite sure this is going to be a regular stumbling block if we don't
change the name.

So, perhaps we could use a tag which says more explicitly what was
intended e.g. "development-slowdown", "dev-brake" or something along
those lines?

regards,


Andrew Dinn
-----------
Senior Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd
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