Comment 3 for bug 772954

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Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

As I understand it, "Opinion" was introduced for, and is used mostly by, the Unity project. So I just did a quick survey of about 30 "Opinion" bug reports, and discovered that even Unity developers are conflicted about what "Opinion" means. Some do use it, as Martin suggested, as an alias for "Won't Fix": see for example bug 700023, bug 706458, bug 708653, bug 870414, bug 962697, bug 962372, or bug 963449. But more often, in the sample I saw, developers -- sometimes even the same developers! -- use it as an alias for "Confirmed": see for example bug 611008, bug 636668, bug 651417, bug 683741, bug 695313, bug 701989, bug 703251, bug 741699, bug 829706, or bug 883917. (And as for people who aren't Unity developers, they interpret it in still other creative ways: see for example bug 781329, which uses it as a synonym for "Incomplete".)

As a result, in other cases -- such as bug 605110, bug 605112, bug 605118, bug 703536, bug 707943, bug 709017, bug 729693, bug 730128, bug 730154, or bug 962698 -- it is genuinely not possible, even after reading the comments, to tell whether the maintainers regard the bug report as describing something that should be fixed. So for example, it is not possible for a potential contributor to tell whether it would be a good use of their time to contribute a prototype or fix. This is counterproductive.

(It's possible that a Unity developer or product strategist will parachute into this bug report and explain what "Opinion" is *supposed* to mean. But that wouldn't even fix the problem for existing Unity developers, let alone for potential developers. And confusion is not the only problem with the status, it's just the most obvious one.)

Therefore, I conclude not only that "Opinion" is more confusing than useful, but also that when it is removed, reports that are currently "Opinion" can't just migrate to "Won't Fix", because that would hide many reports that the developers considered to be valid. Instead, they'll have to migrate to "New" so that project maintainers can re-evaluate them. The migration script could, however, add a tag of the form "project-id.opinion" when it does this, to make the reports easier to find and tackle in one go.