Asking questions without supplying an answer

[alexmojaki]

Currently contributors are discouraged from adding a new question without ensuring that there is also an answer which solves it. This is a conservative decision to preserve the quality of the repo, but it can easily be changed if a system is settled upon with sufficient support.

The idea behind the decision is that people who have a problem they don't know how to solve can post the question to Stack Overflow or a similar site, which already has a good system in place. Porting an answer from there to this repo should be easy. Being able to leave a 'pending' question here would also have advantages but I'd rather here other people's thoughts on the matter before ending up with a system that I regret and would like to migrate away from.

Some reasons to be able to leave unanswered questions:

• It's an indication of the questions that the repo actually needs (since someone thought they would be able to find it here) but does not have.
• Some people may prefer to focus on writing questions as contribution, e.g. quality assurance engineers.
• If someone has already gone through the effort of writing a test, this is any easy way to tap into that.
• Pending questions could periodically be run against all existing answers to see if a solution has accidentally appeared, which the original asker could be notified about. Other people might also want to watch an existing question for such notifications.

Some thoughts on how such a system might work:

• Should there be a separate package pending alongside questions and answers? Or should unanswered questions just live in questions with an unsolved decorator?
• How should the questions be tracked? A simple solution would be to post an issue here. But this would create a lot of clutter and require extensive triaging. Can this be automated? Is there a separate issue tracker that would be well suited for this problem? A desirable feature is for anyone to be able to assign themselves to a question (an advantage over Stack Overflow, where you can spend time answering a question only to find someone else posted an answer first) without needing any other rights on the repo.
• Should pending questions be required to include a link to a Stack Overflow question to show that the asker made an effort to resolve the question by other means?