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Bug 277515

Summary:	When dup'ing a bug, the target bug should get the higher severity.
Product:	Community	Reporter:	Francis Upton IV <francisu>
Component:	Bugzilla	Assignee:	Eclipse Webmaster <webmaster>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	bokowski, gunnar, karl.matthias, Mike_Wilson, pawel.pogorzelski1
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:

Description Francis Upton IV

2009-05-22 14:16:04 EDT

If you have bug A with severity of Critical and you dup it against bug B which was severity Major, bug B should get severity Critical.

And example of where this was a problem is:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=268321

And this was the critical bug that was duped against it:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=268471

The severity of the remaining bug should always be the higher of the two.

Comment 1 Karl Matthias

2009-05-22 16:05:04 EDT

(In reply to comment #0)
> The severity of the remaining bug should always be the higher of the two.

I personally disagree... presumably the bug against which this bug is being duped, has already been triaged and someone has purposely assigned a priority to the bug.  Or they are in the middle of a triage process anyway.  If there is new evidence in the second bug that should raise the priority, then it's the responsibility of the "duper" to set the appropriate priority on the new bug.

For the record, I'm also not sure Bugzilla does this, anyway, unless I'm missing something in the settings.

Comment 2 Boris Bokowski

2009-05-22 16:11:17 EDT

(In reply to comment #1)
> If there is
> new evidence in the second bug that should raise the priority, then it's the
> responsibility of the "duper" to set the appropriate priority on the new bug.

It is the responsibility of a tool to help its users as best as possible. So ideally we would have something that said "the two bugs have different severities" or different target milestons, different priorities, etc.

But I guess we are stuck with Bugzilla and whatever features Bugzilla provides.

Comment 3 Gunnar Wagenknecht

2009-05-23 03:50:35 EDT

(In reply to comment #2)
> But I guess we are stuck with Bugzilla and whatever features Bugzilla provides.

No-one is stuck. Bugzilla is an Open Source community like Eclipse. Everybody can report bugs and submit patches to them. :)

Did anyone report this to the Bugzilla guys already?

Comment 4 Francis Upton IV

2009-05-23 17:41:37 EDT

(In reply to comment #3)

> Did anyone report this to the Bugzilla guys already?
> 
I will look, but I need to know which version of bugzilla we are on.  I could not find an easy way to tell.

Comment 5 Denis Roy

2009-05-26 13:22:08 EDT

We're using Bugzilla 3.0.4.

Comment 6 Denis Roy

2009-07-24 10:22:56 EDT

This is one of those gray areas where Bugzilla Cannot Win.

The severity is determined by the user -- any user -- when the bug report is created.  If you had a minor bug in your list (because you triaged it as minor') how would you feel if it somehow became Critical simply because you duped it with a bug that was opened as critical by some well-intentioned user?

So for every person who says 'bug B should get Severity Critical' another will say the opposite. No one is right, no one is wrong, it's all a matter of opinion and Bugzilla can't guess in which circumstances the severity should be changed or not.

So I'm going to close this as wontfix. There's not much we can do other than disagree on our definition of the proper workflow.