Last modified: 2013-11-14 20:52:11 UTC
All products occasionally cause the user to have their work disappear. It could be the browser crashes, or the UI in a window becomes locked up. The VisualEditor is having more than its fair share of these at the moment, and it would be good to track them with a keyword. There are quite a few Parsoid/VisualEditor bugs that are behind 'corruption' of the wiki database. 'corruption' probably isnt the best name for the keyword. It would include all the nowiki and pawn bugs, but also some parsoid round-trip issues. These are not always high priority/severity, if they are rare or impossible in a 'normal configuration'.
Loss of data is severity=critical by definition ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla/Fields#importance ) hence I don't see a need for a keyword. Refering to a potential database corruption keyword, what are your intentions? Are you just interesting to find a list of all such issues more quickly? Would this keyword somehow help developers to keep track?
A discussion is happening over at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Bugzilla/Fields IMO severity and dataloss are orthogonal. Not all critical are dataloss cases, and some dataloss are not critical. The definition of critical includes a reasonable caveat 'in a widely used and important component'. I would consider bug 52187 to be a dataloss problem, and that its severity of normal is a reasonable assessment. But that doesnt change the fact that real users are loosing their data. IMO bug 54591 would be corruption, but unlikely to be critical as it isnt a standard operation to add a math element and put nothing in it, and it is easily fixable.
(In reply to comment #2) > IMO severity and dataloss are orthogonal. Not all critical are dataloss > cases, > and some dataloss are not critical. The definition of critical includes a > reasonable caveat 'in a widely used and important component'. I agree, it does not always fit, but in most cases. Question is: How exact and specific do we need to tag information in Bugzilla, and for the sake of who? :)
(In reply to comment #1) > Refering to a potential database corruption keyword, what are your > intentions? > Are you just interesting to find a list of all such issues more quickly? > Would this keyword somehow help developers to keep track?
Yes I am intetested in building lists. I could use tracking bugs, but we have this funky keywords feature in bugzilla where dataloss and corruption typically go. Precisely because dataloss and corruption are orthogonal to severity and priority, these keywords would allow periodic review of these bugs that havent been resolved due to prioritisation and open adhoc system. My intentions are to help the mediawiki product and extensions and users.
In case that you are so far the only person interested in this, I recommend to use the Whiteboard field instead of introducing keywords - only difference to keywords is that anybody can use it for tagging (so using a "personal namespace" might be considered, e.g. I use the whiteboard for "aklapper-moreinfo" entries), and that it is not limited to entries globally defined on the server (like for keywords). I'm saying this because I prefer to keep the list of keywords small (as otherwise nobody can remember them anymore and does not set them, seen that problem in many other Bugzillas) and cross-product.
Closing for the time being as per comment 6. Feel free to reopen if there are more requestees / more arguments.
