World: r3wp

Everything is set by the reporter at first, often incorrectly. The 
severity field is a mix of data, some of which affects priority but 
most of which only has bearing on difficulty. I'd like to say the 
priority field is more important, but we have been having difficulty 
making it useful to us, and we mostly track priorities separately. 
Perhaps with some tweaks both of the fields could be more useful 
to us.

We do need a field that contains information about the scale/difficulty 
of the problem, and that is what we have been using the severity 
field for in the R3 project. Basically, anything that requires just 
a tweak to help strings or error messages gets text; then there's 
simple tweaks or minor fixes; new datatypes or fundamental changes 
to major functions gets major; requests to changes in basic evaluation 
semantics gets major, or dismissed, depending on the possibility 
of such a change (some are impossible without breaking REBOL completely). 
The other settings (crash and block) are actually severity. We use 
those levels of difficulty to schedule fixes or in some cases defer 
until later.

We don't really have a field that we are using to state the importance 
to the reporter of the bug, but that is obvious from the description 
and comments, and we set the priority field accordingly. I would 
like a better approach than this, so if the description of our practices 
helps in any way then that would be great.

Thanks for the quick fix, Doc ;-)

I don't oppose the developers using a difficulty field, but using 
severity for it is misleading to users, and frustrating when seeing 
it changed, because that seems to ignore their concerns

We were using it for the severity of the problem/wish itself, not 
for the severity of the problems that were caused to the users by 
the problem. A problem that requires a new datatype is a pretty severe 
problem - we only have the possibility of a limited set of those. 
Typesets are immediate values, not structures.

But the confusion is pretty awkward.

Yes, I understand, but the field is still mislabled

Yup. I think that it should be two fields. At this point we have 
so much to do that the only way we can really judge priorities based 
on user need is through comments left on the ticket by other people. 
There is just too much to do, and too many unanswered questions, 
and a lot of stuff just needs to be put off until we can do it. Once 
we get past the first release we will be better able to just fix 
things when they go wrong. For now, we assume that anything short 
of a crash or block was at least important enough to report, so it 
should be considered.

This means that for now even if there is a user-need field, we pretty 
much need to ignore it because we have to assume that all tickets 
are important. In many cases the person who reported the problem 
doesn't realize how important it is. It's only in the discussions 
that the real importance becomes clear.

For instance, the main criteria for priorities at this stage of development 
is whether the ticket affects basic semantics of the language, or 
crashes the interpreter. Any such changes need to be done before 
the first release, or else code might be written that depends on 
the old semantics. By that standard, the importance to the submitter 
is of limited scope in comparison to the importance to the whole 
community. This is not to diminish the need of an individual user, 
this is just the stage we are at.

The other thing that gets something bumped up in priority at this 
point is whether it is an easy fix, for great user benefit, and applies 
to functions or code that we are going over for other reasons now 
anyways. Your DELINE bug is one of those, Kaj. There are more severe 
bugs in that function that have already put it on the priority list, 
your reported bug should be easy to fix too, it affects a real current 
user base in a significant way, and it hints at the possibility of 
a worse hidden problem. These combined make #1794 a near-term priority.

Of course we could tell all of that from the description :)

I don't oppose changing the submitted severity according to some 
standard, either. Just the misnamed intention of the field

For example, that DELINE bug. I circumvented it, so it's not critical 
to me anymore. But I could only choose between minor and major, so 
I thought for someone trying to process Slovenian text, it would 
be a major problem. If there had been an option "normal", I would 
have chosen that

Then you changed it to minor. I reverse engineered that action to 
conclude that you interpreted the field as severity for you instead 
of severity for the user

Yup, that is how we have been treating that field. Severity for the 
user always varies based on their own circumstances.

So you were communicating that it was difficulty minor, so easy to 
fix. But to most people, I'm afraid, it would appear as dismissing 
their major problem as being minor

Which is why I have to explain this a lot. I have written at least 
a dozen ticket comments to this effect.

It would be a lot easier to just use fields according to their lable 
:-)

I try to not do this all the time as it gets tiresome, and at some 
point the UI problem will be fixed.

I *do* use the fields according to their label. Severity is severity. 
The severity of the user's problem can't be explained without context 
- a field would be useless, you have to give the context in the description 
or comments. The severity for the developers can be expressed in 
a field though, as the context is just the language itself.

As I said, I'm OK with adjusting it to a standard. But that would 
still be severity to the overall community, not severity to the developers. 
Nobody is interested in that

Except the people actually using CureCode to determine and plan fixes 
and changes. The people to whom those fields matter.

You're reversing the meaning of the field by changing it from severity 
of the inconvenience of the bug to severity of the inconvenience 
of the fix

Severity of the change, not some measure of inconvenience. That is 
the main thing that can stop a ticket from being implemented at all, 
the most important field in that group. You are acting like developers 
of the language are more concerned about their own convenience. You 
know that is not the way we work.

That is exactly what I'm telling you. I'm merely asking you to try 
to think for a moment from the perspective of the users you're asking 
to report issues, instead of your own perspective

We are in design mode, and for CureCode as well apparently. All tickets 
are important, or else they wouldn't have been reported.

Come on, then you should just remove the field

If you want to keep explaining yourself to unsuspecting users, I 
apparently can't stop you

We need to break it into two fields. One for the users to report 
their damage, one for us to use for determining the severity of the 
problem (whatever you want to call that). The user damage field wouldn't 
help us much in the process of fixing the user's problems or satisfying 
their requests, but users apparently expect one. We would get the 
real info from the summary, description, example code and comments, 
same as we do now. Without those details the importance of the fix/enhancement 
to the user is impossible to determine, but with those details we 
can really work on the user's problems and understand their priorities.

Keep in mind that I am not suggesting that this be called a "user 
damage" field. I think that it shouldn't be called "severity", because 
that only applies to bugs and issues. Perhaps "importance" would 
be better, as it applies to notes and wishes as well.

We still don't have a good way to set priorities in CureCode though, 
for planning releases. We have to do it manually. The CC priority 
field is OK for general priorities, but not for our priorities because 
our priorities vary from release to release, depending on what area 
of the code we are focusing on.

If a user lables a bug as "crash", that's significant enough, and 
Carl always wants to fix those first

Yeah, the importance field should definitely have crash and block 
importances.

And we reviewers would occasionally raise the importance if the submitter 
underestimated it, such as when it affects more users, or when it 
is a *really* good idea :)

The crash and block settings are the odd ones out of the current 
severity field. They should be moved to the importance field.

Version 0.9.12 sources package released: http://curecode.org/dl/curecode-0912.zip

I've changed the format of the GUID field in RSS feeds, so you'll 
get duplicate entries for the recent changes, just ignore them or 
delete the old ones.

There was a 5h outage on curecode.org affecting cheyenne-server.org 
and softinnov.org. It has been fixed just a few minutes ago.


After short investigation, it seems that a PHP internal issue (frozen 
process) caused a fatal error in Cheyenne main process. The error 
is very weird, see below the disarmed REBOL error :

make object! [
    code: 301
    type: 'script
    id: 'need-value
    arg1: evt:
    arg2: none
    arg3: none
    near: [evt: do-events 
        either none? evt
    ]
    where: 'do-cheyenne-app
]


So, DO-EVENTS (which is basically just WAIT [ ]) returned an unset! 
value. Does anyone know here if this a known behaviour or a REBOL 
bug?

I've never seen this.

any update on adding the R3 GUI as a project to curecode?

R3 GUI project added to CureCode, ticket http://issue.cc/r3/1837
moved to R3 GUI.

I've added alpha 110 & 111 to versions list, let me know if you need 
categories too (I would need an ordered list of items for that).

Great, thanks.

cool :-)

Sorry for the delay, I forgot about it until Henrik mentioned it 
again yesterday.

it's ok. now we have it. :-)

Doc, can you create a CC login for me please. Thx.

You have one already.

Loginid Robert.