How I Prioritize OSS Bugs

I just got back from a week long vacation with the family, and I was as rested and relaxed as I can ever be, at least before I picked up a head cold on the last day. Today though, it’s time to start catching up on OSS bug reports that have come in in the past 10 days or so. I thought it might be fun to dash off my personal prioritization for the bugs that come into the Marten, Wolverine, or related projects.

Roughly, here’s an unscientific ranking of the factors that get bugs fixed sooner rather than later:

Any issue that is blocking or harming a JasperFx Software client’s system
Issues that already have user supplied pull requests to fix the issue. You never want to leave a pull request open too long if someone has taken the time to contribute. It still happens for a variety of reasons, but you do still try.
Bugs that I find embarrassing
Any problem that would likely give a new user a poor first impression of the tools
Problems that I think would potentially impact many users
Any other issue for a JasperFx client
Issues reported by significant contributors, and I’m pretty loose with what I think of as “significant”
Easy fixes just to help keep the open GitHub issue counts as low as possible because that’s something I do care about
Open issues in whatever project I happen to be preparing a release for while that project has my attention
Any issue that will require breaking API changes in the tool, but this subset will sometimes be prioritized to the top whenever we’re making a full point release
Any issue that is going to require significant changes to the internals, but this is somewhat similar to the previous line
Issues that aren’t likely to impact many users
Issues reported by people being kind of a jerk that aren’t likely to impact many users

For older versions of any of the tools, like Marten 7.*, the list is much shorter:

For a JasperFx Software client who cannot upgrade soon, we’ll of course make fixes to the older branch and forward that fix to the current version
For everybody else, eh, probably not unless it’s really bad or they’ve just asked very nicely