Hi folks,
Before I say anything more, I want to apologise if I upset any of you with the 'arrogance or laziness' phrase; it is a phrase I use on myself when I respond negatively in response to some naive end-user pointing out an issue which I don't really want to deal with - either because
(a) I don't relate to it as being a bug ('arrogance') - mainly stemming from either ignorance of the issue, or my own conviction regarding how something 'should be'.
(b) I haven't got the time to do it ('laziness') - often due to lack of resources, or a different consideration of priorities.
Of course, the words we use towards ourselves can sound completely out of place when used out of context, and this was one of those times.
Mea Culpa - my sole (really weak) excuse is that I have been busy (emotionally and physically) burying a close friend who recently passed away from a sudden and devastating cancer, and I am not looking for sympathy here. On my side I was lazy not to post my bugs. I will register onto gitlab and I will also post bugs there in future.
What I have been given by yourselves is a window of insight into the dev group behind Inkscape, and wow - you have a really healthy relationship as a group. I'm not being ironic: You are all able to discuss these things without groupthink, while contributing with both conviction but also flexibility. I'm impressed. Unless my world changes dramatically, I doubt I will have any time to tool up to be able to contribute significantly to the Inkscape project - but I am encouraged.
Your contributions and discussion arising from my post has been thought-provoking. It got me thinking (yet again) all about what a bug is in the first place, and this is all going to be IMO, anyhow...
In many ways, as developers we often find ourselves dealing with language bugs - stuff that won't compile, weird crashes, and memory leaks (even in C++17, but wow I'm so glad that C++ is beginning to protect memory management); I guess many of you has been around long enough to remember the days when we didn't have static analysis or even IDEs; (that's enough reminiscing Ben). But for the user, any form of unexpected behaviour is a bug - and this 'unexpected behaviour' is exactly what we have designed. It's at these times that it can be seriously difficult to accept our design as a bug. I have argued - way beyond my own investment in it - against calling some user issue a bug, because I feel that both the users and the other project stakeholders don't understand the elegance, beauty - fuckit - ART behind the code that I deliver.
So again, I'm really sorry if I ruffled feathers. I believe I can empathise.
For the concrete case: maybe adding a 'first' somewhere into that text would already be enough to clarify that discussion is in *some* cases recommended *before* making a report / feature request?
Ben, what do you think? Would that have helped to not be surprised by the request to report your findings after discussing them?
I was thinking a lot about Maren's comments (the above, and others) re. bug reporting: Maybe it's best to have a one-stop shop for all issues, regardless of whether or not the dev. community considers it a bug. I don't know if any of you ever worked on projects like firefox, but they have upwards of 15 million reports on Bugzilla now; it does mean that more time would be needed to de-duplicate / cross-reference, and so on - but you probably have to do that already anyhow. There are challenges with bug report systems - one of them being that we really do need to get bug reports (and converting them into a digestible prioritised task, knowing that we are going to be able to reproduce the problem is always a challenge), but asking a user to sign up to post a bug report is often an obstacle to the user. The user is normally going to be a pissed off when the bug occurs - especially if there's been a crash without recoverable work...
It also pains it for me to say, but a quick poll with the team here suggests that I am one of very few who -ever- posts bug reports to 3rd party software. My family didn't even know it 'was a thing you could do', so bug reports are really valuable - after all, with community-oriented software, the users are often going to be your alpha/beta testers, and you want to make it as comfortable as possible to report their issues.
I know we get this sort of thing of wanting to bug-bash and clear them all, and sometimes when there's lots of them, the last thing we want is to be dumped with a whole load more - but maybe it's our attitude to bug reports that need to change (I really am talking about me here). I have found it really demoralising when nobody reports any bugs at all!
Remember the godawful "Are you sure you want to quit?" alerts that plagued applications for a couple of decades or more? Maybe, and while it is in development, Inkscape could offer an optional response form... something like:
It is our ambition to make Inkscape as easy and as intuitive as possible for you to use; as it is a community-developed application, we would really like to hear about your experience today. If there was anything about your experience in this session that you feel could be improved upon, could you describe it so that we can consider it in future releases:
[Submit Feedback] [Not this time] [Exit and don't show this form again]
It's just a thought.
On #1193 (thanks guys) and the other UI/UX issues, I would suggest thinking of using preferences for the variation of types of behaviour, defaulting to OS Conventions - this allows for those who migrate across OS to get the 'same experience' - which I see as valid, as well as providing the user expectations of single OS users (which I also see as valid). I really have no skills with GTK+, but I would have thought that the MacOS expectation could be managed with an invisible/hidden window, (which would mean adding a visibility attribute to a document class somewhere, I guess). Much that it is counter-intuitive to non MacOS users, windowless 'menubar+dock' presence is the norm for most mac users.
..and now I'm being called over to fix some bugs...
The best to you all.
-Ben