Item groups in bug tracker: "incorrect result" too broad, and masked by "regression"

[LachlanA]

Greetings all,

A discussion came up in a bug report in which A(x,y) is assigned a value,
and after assigning to other elements of A,  A(x,y) has a totally new value. 
This is clearly a major problem, since it makes numerical results from
Octave untrustworthy.

This seems the sort of bug that should be flagged "incorrect result".  I'd
like to find all such gross errors and try to fix them, but this is hard
because "incorrect result" also sounds like the most appropriate item group
for things like unexpected behaviour of the GUI.

To make matters worse, the A(x,y) bug was a regression.  It is useful to
know that, but flagging it as "Item group"="regression" hid the serious
nature of the bug -- it was not longer "incorrect result".  Perhaps the
seriousness could have  been flagged by the underused "severity" field, but
that isn't something a submitter can't do.

I proposed splitting "incorrect result" into two: one (perhaps "wrong
answer") clearly for numerical errors and one (perhaps "wrong behaviour")
intended for errors in other settings.  Michael Godfrey suggested that
"wrong answer" may still be too broad and suggested "fatal error".  I
personally think this sounds like either a crash of Octave or a  bug that
crashes the users code, rather than a grossly wrong answer.  Perhaps "gross
numerical error" is the right term, but to me that suggests something like
amplified roundoff errors (e.g., 1 / (a-b) for  similar a and b).

Does anyone have suggestions for this, or how to specify a regression
without masking the other item-group values?  Does anyone have suggestions
for how to prioritise debugging effort, given most bugs have the default
priority and severity?

Finally, (just my ignorance) does anyone know how to search among only open
bugs in Savannah?  When I search, it ignores the Display Criteria settings.

Thanks,
Lachlan



--
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Item-groups-in-bug-tracker-incorrect-result-too-broad-and-masked-by-regression-tp4674355.html
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.