[development] Voting on issues (was Re: How to post bug reports and patches)

[andrew morton]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:50 AM, Brad Bowman <brad at atendesigngroup.com> wrote:
> Can you guys give me the run down on how this is expected to help with
> newer contributors getting their work recognized?  I see adding issue
> voting as just perpetuating the system we have now, where the most
> known/active contributors get their patches looked at by more people
> than new contributors. I see this as just pushing that problem one
> step further up the line, where now they'll get their issues 'dugg'
> more.

I think the primary benefit would be that people who weren't in a
position to offer technical commentary but are affected by the issue
could vote for it to help raise its profile--especially for the issues
that don't affect a majority of users. And they'd be able to do so in
a way that doesn't clutter up a queue with +1 or me too comments.

> I see this also as a potential distraction for patches that are
> important, but not exciting. I don't think things like documentation
> and coding standards would not fare too well in a voting contest, but
> that doesn't diminish their importance.

Those two are probably bad examples because they're the easiest type
of patches to review and commit. But in general I don't see it being a
huge problem because I'm guessing that you'll be able to rank the
results of a search.

andrew