[Qgis-psc] Changing our default response to requests/bugs?

[Mathieu Pellerin]

Nyall,

I like the idea of coming up with an expanded response to reported issues
and feature requests. That said, while I feel your response example is very
fitting for feature requests, IMHO it is not proper for issues / bug raised
by users.

While I agree that a person requesting a yet-to-be feature should be
invited to take on the responsibility of seeing it implemented, I don’t
think this is right to deliver the same message to QGIS users and testers
when it comes to issues they stumble upon and report. Doing so could risk
leaving users with the impression that the QGIS community does not welcome
issue reporting, which would be harmful to the project.

For one, we actually incite issue reporting during the freeze period at the
end of each development cycle to insure we ship a stable product. We’re
requesting users to donate time and energy to test out the software and
report bugs, that’s extremely important and should be encouraged, not
dissuaded.

This is especially true for new features introduced during a development
cycle, whereas a paid / sponsored developer benefits from free user testing
and reporting to insure that the feature he / she was financed to code is
rock solid.

Therefore, I think we should come up with two template responses: one for
feature requests (I can’t think of ways to improve your text above), and
one for issue reporting. When it comes to the latter, we should:
- begin with thanking the user for taking time to report issues, and invite
him / her to file an issue on the hub with as much details as possible,
stressing need for steps to reproduce issue as a way to ease workload on
developers
- insure expectations from users reporting issues are managed so that he /
she doesn’t expect an overnight response to avoid needlessly frustrating
reporters, as well as developers :)
- gently invite users to donate to the QGIS project by mentioning that part
of the donations go to fixing reported issues in each development cycle

Hope those thoughts help out.

Math
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