New forum group: bug suspects(?)
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Second time found myself false reporting a bug. I feel bad about it, because I wasted precious time of some serious developer. On the qt-interest list and here sometimes we have posts about possible Qt bugs, where the community takes a look and try to come up with something.
I would further encourage this, because the community knowledge can spare some time for the developers, for example, point out a false bug report before even reporting. I suggest a new forum category, where we can collect the suspected Qt bugs, and there we can have some discussion, confirmation and revelation before we send our problems to the Qt machine.
Please consider!
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I am not sure this is such a good idea: We already have so many ways people are using to report bugs (feedback link in creator, e-mail to people and/or the different mailing lists, this forum, other forums, distribution bug trackers, etc.). It is really confusing as is, adding yet another option to the mix is not going to help I think, even if it is only meant as a filter to the bug tracker itself.
I would appreciate if you could just use "the bugtracker":http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/. It provides one central place for us developers to look into, it is a tool meant to discuss and triage issues and does that job better than any forum, it integrates with the release management and asking somebody about QTCREATORBUG-1 is so much simpler than asking for 'that thread I saw last week in some forum somewhere':-). As a reporter you can always close issues when you discover they are actually in your code, too.
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But maybe forum can be used to talk about issue, if it directly isn’t a bug, but just a missing feature, or something? We actually did that once before here :) No need for trolls to attend to it, bug can be filed after people actually knows it just isn’t false thinking.
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Smar: How about using the "brainstorm forum":http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums/viewforum/9/ for that?
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I am all for discussing possible bugs or weird behavior of Qt in the forum. The challenge there is to find the right moment to conclude if it's a bug or not and who actually goes and reports it. As Tobias stated earlier, only bug reports in the bugtracker are useful at all.
So let me turn the question around and ask: what stops you from discussing bugs inside the bugtracker? Is the tool too cumbersome? Do you feel like you might bother anybody with a bug report that turns out to not be a valid one?
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Tobias: Hmm, that should be right one for it.
Alexandra: I always submit bugs, even if I think they are wrong. But I also like to talk about desing decisions and such, and that kind of brainstorming doesn't reallly fit to restrictions of bug trackers, and more importantly, I suppose actual users aren't really reading every new bug report...
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Tobias: I accept your opinion. The question I would raise is, which one is more distraction at the moment: false or imprecise bug reports or another forum what the Trolls actually need not to monitor. I read it somewhere, that at the moment, more bug reports are opening, then you can close. So a kind of pre-filter would help your work too.
Alexandra: In the bugtracker I definitely feel, it's not a place to discuss. And I'm very sure, when I send a report there I take some precious time of some serious Trolls, to take care of the often silly report or misunderstanding. Overall it doesn't encourage me to send too much reports there, because of the above.
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Dii: Any help dealing with bugs is welcome! But why not triage issues directly in the bugtracker? That way you would get way more trolls involved:-)
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Suppose we add a new forum for bugs, should I post a problem I'm facing now with quick, in the quick forum or in qt bug forum?
So, instead of a separate forum, maybe we should just continue posting potential Qt bugs for discussion in relevant forums (desktop or quick or webkit), and once confirmed as bug, the thread author goes ahead and posts the bug in bug tracker. I remember quite a few bugs being logged this way and think this process is working fine.
I also agree, we should confirm first that we have encountered a bug and then post to the Qt bug tracker. Too many invalid ones there is not good :)
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So it looks like we have some pros and cons, anyway the Trolls have to decide if they have benefits or not with this method. Remember, the question is not that if the forum could be used for bug report pre-confirmation. Obviously it's possible. The question is, if we want to encourage the people to do this or they should go straight to bugtracker.