[REQUEST] It'd be cool if rofi issue tracking didn't lock resolved issues

[DavidAntliff]

I think it's a mistake to lock resolved issues, preventing new comments from non-original participants. Sometimes new people to the issue need to seek clarification and there's no way to do this without creating a new issue, that isn't really a bug or feature request (like this one). This can create more issues and more noise, but it's also off-putting to potential new contributors.

Very few open-source projects take this step, and for good reason - sometimes issues aren't actually fixed, or the resolution isn't clear to people outside the original discussion.

Apologies for the misuse of the Issues system to bring this up but I'm not sure how to otherwise bring this to anyone's attention.

[github-actions[bot]]

@DavidAntliff: hello! 👋

This issue is being automatically closed because it does not follow the issue template.

[DaveDavenport]

To keep the issue tracker workable for us and usable for the users I want people to follow the guidelines and steer them to the right place. We put in effort to help the user with this.

For this reason when you click new issue, we present a menu with options:

Then when you click 'new issue', It provides a template to fill in and it tells you to read the guidelines.

In the guidelines it even tells you that we don't want old issues to be resurrected from the grave and used to ask unrelated questions or get unrelated items added to it.

we have a template that has the guideline in there we ask people to fill in. So it should be linked on the top of each issue.

This was not enough, people ignored these instructions. This to me made the issue tracker unworkable.

I do not know if you did this on purpose:

but you clearly proofed my point by ignoring the instructions and making this discussion in the issue tracker, ignoring the menu and the guidelines where it offered 3 discussion places. (reddit, the discussion forum on github and irc) and deleting the template.

From the guidelines:

These location are also mentioned in the manpage and the -help output of rofi.

Therefore we now lock issues after a period of inactivity. This was not done out of spite or to frustrate new users, but it is regrettable the only way to keep the issue tracker clean and workable.

I will move this to the github discussion forum as that to me is the right place for this.

[DaveDavenport]

I would not mind a follow up on this discussion, see how we can clarify the process for users?
It seems clear to me we failed in this process despite our best effort.

I myself am a big fan of this discussion form, we can easily move questions that are bugs to the issue tracker, people can mark questions as answered and more. IMHO I would not mind if every issue starts off as an discussion and moved accordingly. Would this be something workable?

[renanwp2]

I'm new here and I want to make a new [REQUEST] and, for me, this is a good and easy advice. =) I bet putting this information in the README.md would suffice.

[DavidAntliff]

I don't know what to say, really. I had a problem with a historical bug-fix (I can't even remember what it was now), I didn't want to open a new issue in case I misunderstood something. I didn't follow the template because I wasn't submitting an issue - I used the Feature Request option as it seemed the most apt. Most open-source projects keep things more casual, I was just surprised that this one doesn't. I didn't see the links to the forum or IRC until you pointed them out. To be fair, I didn't scrape the site looking for a solution, I just wanted to provide fast feedback.

[DaveDavenport]

With the goal to improve this, what can we do to make it more visible? I think the buttons should have showed up when you went through the issue/feature request process. I agree you should not have to 'scrape the site', but given the many points during the issue filing track it is mentioned, I thought it was clear. Can you indicate where it is missing? then I can try to improve that.

The reason is pretty simple, I do this in my free time as a hobby. I don't have to much time or energy to spend on rofi and I prefer to put that toward development. The issue tracker did truely became unmaintainble for me and very frustrating, It was the choice do I remove the issue tracker or try to make it manegable. I hope you can understand that people not reading the information provided and even deleting the template (and therefor not providing the information I need to answer the question, resulting in repeated back and forth) is very time consuming for no good reason, especially because I am expected to spend the effort and time to look into it and answer.

[DavidAntliff]

You make a fair point and I'm sorry I broke the system. I'm not sure what is missing other than a way to quickly provide feedback on existing closed issues without going through the entire template process.

[DaveDavenport]

You did not break the system, I am just trying to explain it as you asked questions about it and i think it is important to explain the reasoning. I try to put in the effort to provide a good answer, this takes time (and I do expect this from the other side).

I agree it is not ideal, but most resurrected issues where not related to the question/feedback added, or so far from the current state it was not relevant. I agree it is often not easy for the user to judge what is and isn't related, so I rather have a new issue.

For the point of not going through the template, that is exactly the point, a question is asked (related or not) with minimal information (version number as very simple example) so I need to make assumptions. This very often resulted in confusion as I did not have the right context/information and my answer did not satisfy with what the user wanted/needed.