Rename ticket "severity" to ticket "importance"

[Christian Boos]

This ticket focuses on the "extended" ticket model, the one which combines the severity field and the priority field and which is still supported in 0.9 either when upgrading existing Trac 0.8 systems, or when a newly created 0.9 system is manually adapted to restore the "old" behavior (see #1861).

Thinking again on the priority/severity issue, it seems now clear that the name severity is not adapted, as cmlenz pointed out in #2220.

However, a lot of Trac users expect to be able to independantly qualify the objective impact the ticket has on the project, as blocker, critical, major, minor or trivial, and be able to prioritize the actual work based on some other considerations than objective importance.

For instance, a feature request of minor impact, which is late for some reason, could be deemed of the highest priority, due to some external pressure… That reason won't change the objective importance of the issue, but setting the priority to highest means it's now time to get rid of it…

But it had been pointed out that the term severity is badly chosen to express the importance of tickets of other types than defect… Therefore I propose to change the name of this field to importance which is more generic and would also make sense for enhancements and tasks.

[Matthew Good]

Hmm, I think that "importance" is rather ambiguous in how it differs from "priority". Right now the "severity" field is left for backwards compatibility and renaming it would certainly cause confusion. I would prefer to eliminate the "severity" field entirely in a future release, since the custom fields already give users a way to model an additional field if they find it necessary. There seems to be enough dissent on what this additional field should represent that I don't see a good way to come up with a standard for it.

[Christian Boos]

Another alternative: severity ⇒ impact

It's just to avoid the awkward "severity of an enhancement" situation for 0.9 upgrades. That change wouldn't have any incidence to what we decide to do beyond 0.9.

[Christian Boos]

Ok, nevermind.