[QGIS-Developer] Bug #21460?

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 09/04/2019 03.41, Nyall Dawson wrote:

> If you can suggest any ways to improve the wording of that post (while
> keep the core message intact), please let me know.

>>>> On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 4:30 AM Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> may I suggest you an interesting read?
>>>>> https://nyalldawson.net/2016/08/how-to-effectively-get-things-changed-in-qgis/

I want to second Cory, to me it also feels a little rude to tell a
'user' (not a developer) to try to code or pay for a dev. And I'm a
dutchie, known for their blunt talk :-)

@Nyall: in my opinion your followup article:
http://nyalldawson.net/2016/08/how-to-effectively-get-things-changed-in-qgis-a-follow-up/
has a better 'tone' for non developers.

We should probably mix your followup article with the first one and put
it in the website (in the 'user' section) so it is translatable, so
translators can maybe even add more 'cultural politness' to it if needed?

WHO wants to do that (you can earn karma points if you do this !!)??

We should also make clear that it IS OK to ask for the community to have
a look at the an issue which makes your(!) live a hell. But also make it
clear that to be fair your problems are not always the problems of
somebody else. Same goes for commercial software by the way, only they
are not as transparent as we are. And that we are humans with not enough
time to solve all the problems in the world.

STILL I'm not sure what the right tone is to tell people to read such a
text though... people (me included!) will feel a little offended anywat
when not helped but sent to a page to read what they should do...

I think Geoserver does a good job:

https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/Successfully-requesting-and-integrating-new-features-and-improvements-in-GeoServer
And Ian's talk: (though it can maybe be polished a little):
https://www.ianturton.com/talks/foss4g.html#/how-to-earn-support


@Cory: please stay on the good side :-)

May I suggest to make your bug report even better by adding data and
instructions so for an average developer, it is 10 minutes work to
replicate your issue? Or should we just create the table and start
editing? If so please add some steps. For example some googling revealed
to me that I need: "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "uuid-ossp";" to use
the uuid_generate_v4() function you use?

Also make sure it is actually a QGIS problem, looking into it, it is.
But it is also a data-schema issue, as you define the problematic
columns as:
predecessors uuid[] DEFAULT ARRAY[]::uuid[],
And the "uuid[]" is not a very common type in the gis world.

If I'm correct '{""}' (what QGIS now uses for NULL values if the column
has an array type) is a textual representation of an array with one
string in it. Would it be better to do '{null}' or even '{}' instead?
Can you try to create an update query with '{null}' and '{}' values in
the empty array fields?
And add these queriies to the bug report?

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde