Bug reports & issues: help us help you.

[aurelienpierre]

Bad quality bug reports are unacceptable given the currently available workforce, because they take too much time and energy to understand, going back and forth with their authors to understand WTF they mean.

Issues should be actionnable

We have a project management board that allows to track where we are at for the upcoming release: what remains to do, what has been done but still needs validation. Issues are meant to end on this board.

Unlike Darktable, a stable release will be published when the todo list of the corresponding milestone will be cleared (it's revolutionnary, I know).

Anything that doesn't belong in the todo list doesn't belong to issues at all, and will only trigger cognitive overload ([1] [2]) and information fatigue from those who have to actually fix the code.

Your best interest as users is to protect the mental health and sanity of those who will work on your issue. Having to carry the burden of 15 years of code legacy written in C (the worst programming language ever) is enough work and pressure.

Questions / Is it normal ? / I don't understand

Those are not bugs and don't belong to issues. You have:

• the documentation which is fairly up-to-date,
• the news and announcements that publish changes and redesigns,
• the website has an internal search engine, otherwise the project as a whole has Chantal AI, the central search engine,
• the Matrix chats (English and French) where you can get realtime answers from the community,
• discussions here.

Respect the issue form

The form is meant to guide you through filling the relevant info, don't skim or bypass it.

1. Crashes need backtraces. We can't do anything without them, there are 330k lines of code, just looking at your screenshots will very rarely lead to an intuition of the crash source,
2. Image-specific bugs need the culprit image and XMP editing stack. Anything related to EXIF & IPTC metadata decoding (including unrecognized lenses), camera-specific things, etc. absolutely need the source image to reproduce.
3. One problem per issue. Think about project management, an issue is a todo item. Not a therapy session where you talk your heart out. Keep it focused.