Anonymous Bug reports and feature requests
Anonymous Bug reports and feature requests are a bad idea.
There are many anonymous bug reports and feature requests that are poorly explained some with no more than a summary and no description whatsoever.
Without someone to follow up and provide a more detailed description I think these reports only waste people time. Many of the requests are wishlists, rather than specific enhancment requests. There are inevitably duplicate or overlapping reports.
Vague suggestions and requests should be directed to the user list so that we at least have a contact address and can get people to clarify what they mean. If the suggestions are good and users are still unwilling to register to file a bug report some one else will be willing to put their name to the report.
Openness is good up to a point but I think a minimum barrier is necessary, and that reporters are need to put their name to a report and take some responsibility and show they care about a feature before developers expecting developers to spend their time on it. I dont believe that many people are looking at the request tracker and it is difficult to manage so many vague reports.
I think the system needs to be changed to require people to log in before posting feature requests and bug reports.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
We don't want to raise the barrier for participation though...it is better to get some feedback rather than none. Do you really think we are at the point to erect this barrier?
Jon
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 08:36, Alan Horkan wrote:
Anonymous Bug reports and feature requests are a bad idea.
There are many anonymous bug reports and feature requests that are poorly explained some with no more than a summary and no description whatsoever.
Without someone to follow up and provide a more detailed description I think these reports only waste people time. Many of the requests are wishlists, rather than specific enhancment requests. There are inevitably duplicate or overlapping reports.
Vague suggestions and requests should be directed to the user list so that we at least have a contact address and can get people to clarify what they mean. If the suggestions are good and users are still unwilling to register to file a bug report some one else will be willing to put their name to the report.
Openness is good up to a point but I think a minimum barrier is necessary, and that reporters are need to put their name to a report and take some responsibility and show they care about a feature before developers expecting developers to spend their time on it. I dont believe that many people are looking at the request tracker and it is difficult to manage so many vague reports.
I think the system needs to be changed to require people to log in before posting feature requests and bug reports.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
SF.Net email is sponsored by Shop4tech.com-Lowest price on Blank Media 100pk Sonic DVD-R 4x for only $29 -100pk Sonic DVD+R for only $33 Save 50% off Retail on Ink & Toner - Free Shipping and Free Gift. http://www.shop4tech.com/z/Inkjet_Cartridges/9_108_r285 _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
We currently get a sufficiently high level of participation both in the bug tracker and feature request lists that it does not seem like too much of a barrier. It's true that it will probably reduce the number of submissions, but as Alan points out, many times we need to be able to re-contact the individual for clarification or to test out the fix, so many of the anonymous submissions can't be acted on anyway.
Bryce
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
We don't want to raise the barrier for participation though...it is better to get some feedback rather than none. Do you really think we are at the point to erect this barrier?
Jon
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 08:36, Alan Horkan wrote:
Anonymous Bug reports and feature requests are a bad idea.
There are many anonymous bug reports and feature requests that are poorly explained some with no more than a summary and no description whatsoever.
Without someone to follow up and provide a more detailed description I think these reports only waste people time. Many of the requests are wishlists, rather than specific enhancment requests. There are inevitably duplicate or overlapping reports.
Vague suggestions and requests should be directed to the user list so that we at least have a contact address and can get people to clarify what they mean. If the suggestions are good and users are still unwilling to register to file a bug report some one else will be willing to put their name to the report.
Openness is good up to a point but I think a minimum barrier is necessary, and that reporters are need to put their name to a report and take some responsibility and show they care about a feature before developers expecting developers to spend their time on it. I dont believe that many people are looking at the request tracker and it is difficult to manage so many vague reports.
I think the system needs to be changed to require people to log in before posting feature requests and bug reports.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
SF.Net email is sponsored by Shop4tech.com-Lowest price on Blank Media 100pk Sonic DVD-R 4x for only $29 -100pk Sonic DVD+R for only $33 Save 50% off Retail on Ink & Toner - Free Shipping and Free Gift. http://www.shop4tech.com/z/Inkjet_Cartridges/9_108_r285 _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Jon Phillips wrote:
Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:37:50 -0700 From: Jon Phillips <jon@...235...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: inkscape inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Anonymous Bug reports and feature requests
We don't want to raise the barrier for participation though...it is better to get some feedback rather than none.
Bad feedback takes time. Is there any point responding to anonymous requests in the tracker, will users ever read the responses? If a user does not care enough about a feature to provide adequate information and a way to get clarification how likely is it that the feature is really important?
Do you really think we are at the point to erect this barrier?
There is so much that can be done to improve Inkscape before looking at bug reports, there is so much that can be learned from Illustrator or Freehand (and others).
I got a little frustrated going through a few bug reports, some were incomprehensible, some were lists of features instead of just one request, people keep asking for improved PDF support, people keep asking for improved widgets which I dont think is even within the scope of Inkscape.
The Roadmap is useful but even with the good requests there is not enough information, it is very difficult to know what features are even likely to be implemented.
Even if you were to disallow anonymous bug reports users can still provide feedback through the mailing lists.
If more people were going through the reports, providing prompt replies and adding comments clarfying what the features should actually be I would probably not be suggesting anonymous reports be removed but as it is now there are lots of vague requests. I also have other things going on which are bothering me so I probably shouldn't even have gone near the request tracker.
Sorry for getting all bothered over such a small detail. I usually resist the temptation to fire off ranting emails but I had a bad day.
I do still think an issue tracking system where users cannot be contacted to get followup information is unmanagable.
Later
Alan
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/proj/Inkscape/
I'm against banning anon bugreports. Many times the anon reporters follow up and provide enough info to fix the bug. So this is not a problem now I think. Maybe when we get 10+ reports every day...
On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 16:08, bulia byak wrote:
I'm against banning anon bugreports. Many times the anon reporters follow up and provide enough info to fix the bug. So this is not a problem now I think. Maybe when we get 10+ reports every day...
I'm with bulia. So far it hasn't been a huge problem.
It would be an interesting metric to compare the number of anonymous bug reports with the number of reports overall.
-mental
participants (5)
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Alan Horkan -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Jon Phillips -
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