Trac voting

[Simon Marlow]

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> Our priorities for bug-fixing are driven in part by our perceptions of what the GHC user community thinks is important to them.  But our perceptions are pretty flaky.
> 
> I wish Trac supported (or could support) some kind of voting mechanism, so that individual users could say "this bug is important/very important/show-stopper for me".  Then we could rank bugs by how many such votes they'd accumulated.  That might not be the sole determinant of our priorities, but it'd be a good one.  I often wonder about a bug report (or indeed feature request) "I wonder if anyone else cares about this, apart from the reporter?".  As the open-bug count climbs (we have 191 milestoned for 6.8!), the scale changes and our tools may need to change too.
> 
> There'd need to be a way to ensure that each person voted only once.  Indeed, it'd make sense to require people to log in before voting, and to accumulate the identities of the voters (which gives a natural constituency to consult).
> 
> I'm sure this can't be a new problem; any large-scale project must encounter the same issue of priorities loads of bug reports.   So perhaps we could get an off the shelf solution?
> 
> I'm just sending this to cvs-ghc at the moment (plus Don in case he isn't on it).

There are Trac plugins for voting which we could look into, but I thought I'd 
mention an existing way to get this kind of functionality: people interested in 
a bug could just add themselves to the CC list for the bug.  Then they'd get 
email when the bug was fixed, too.  Of course we should add prominent notices to 
that effect in the right places.  We could perhaps build a small extension to 
Trac that would order bugs by size of CC list, or something.

Cheers,
	Simon