New releases for bugfixes

[mail at flherne.uk]

On 2022-09-06 19:41, Nate Graham wrote:
> To revive this thread, I think the issue is that it feels sort of
> subjective what kind of bugs are bad enough that we think like a new
> release is worth it. So maybe we can try to get specific and say that
> we should make a new release for fixes of Bugzilla bug reports where:
> - Priority is VHI or HI
> - Severity is critical, grave, or major
> - Possibly also the "crash" severity?
> 
> What do people think about that?
> 
> Nate

Thanks for trying to progress this, but I don't see the purpose of such 
a policy.

The decision to make an extra release is quite objective really -- it's 
a concrete yes/no decision with known costs and a fairly clear estimate 
of the benefit to users.

Triaging of bugs is far *more* subjective, especially if they're 
(partially) feature requests, because the solution and its impact are 
often rather hypothetical and because there are so many more options to 
select.

In most projects the maintainers who'd make a release decision are the 
same people who triage bugs, so this policy would only add 'paperwork' 
while leaving the choice in the same hands.

Such a rigid policy would frequently give undesired decisions in 
practice, for example fixes for "HI" issues that involve code changes 
too large for a bugfix release or "crash" bugs that only occur in very 
rare circumstances.

The result would either be routine exceptions to the policy, which would 
undermine the point of having it, or maintainers being pressured to 
alter bug priorities to produce the correct decision at the cost of 
wasted time and possibly less-accurate bug tagging.

-Francis H