This has come up recently on IRC. At the time I arguably overreacted but we can add that to the list of @ben79 screw ups. It is a long list…
Anyway the thought occurred that maybe Developers, Maintainers, and QA people need to discuss this.
My perspective has been that this simply is not that important because we are such a small group and because things like this tend to be ignored anyway due to our “unwritten” policies. See here.
Regardless of what is marked in a given bug in reality there are 3 priorities.
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Blocker - This only applies in development process and is meant to mean a “must” fix bug before release is allowed.
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Packaging - RPM request to either add or update software. This basically happens when developers/maintainers have the time to do it. Packages in contrib/unsupported repos will normally take longer.
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All other issues.
My observation has been this is how we actually work. Until very recently it never seemed to me if a bug marked “Highest” was any more likely to be fixed or fixed sooner than one marked “Normal” or “Low”. The key to getting a bug fixed or fixed sooner has, to me, always been more related to getting the attention of a dev or maintainer that can fix it. This ranges from very easy some times to very difficult. This is not a criticism it is an observation.
So now we do, thankfully, have some new people involved and a few more than we used. So perhaps this part of the process needs to be discussed, sharpened, and tightened?