4.x Nightly 10/15 AppImage: First Impressions

• Oct 15, 2020 - 10:54

This is more like a small essay rather than reporting stuff: you might already know what's wrong, so this might also be a useless post. But I guess master builds are still full of bugs...

MasterHome.png This page looks fine, but if you look closely you get a small black thing inside the "Open other" button... this can be found in the other pages too. But the concept gets me really excited uwu

MasterScore.png Why is it in Chinese? I did not set it to those. And those boxes next to the palettes box, displaying "palettes" and "inspector"... kinda looks weird.

MasterPublish.png Guess wip.

MasterSequencer.png Also wip(?).

MasterSettings.png This is really dissatisfying ... I got scared when I looked at it... what is going on? xD oh I got a nice idea for this one: It could display the name of the setting and next to it display the folder path (as it does now) but with lighter colors! I can also confirm that this thing with the Chinese is a bug... I think.

MasterDevTools.png Same bug as in the "Open other" button... this link on the top too... xD

Account.png this page gives me the feeling that I could scroll down but can't.

Guess 4.x is too weird to test/understand yet.


Comments

It has been pointed out a couple of times that the UI is not yet ready in any way. Your remarks really concentrate on the UI, and it's too early for that...

It has been pointed out a couple of times that the UI is not yet ready in any way. Your remarks really concentrate on the UI, and it's too early for that...

In reply to by DanielR

Ditto.

I think this kind of testing and reporting will become immensely valuable very soon. Right now, we are still plugging in the core UI components and a lot of the stuff you are looking at is only half way finished.

In many cases, the UI work has not even started yet (like the weird Palettes / Inspector tabs).

Within 2 months or so, I would expect the app to start taking shape visually and functionally. I'm going to be posting about what our plans are in the next week, so you know what to expect. I also think it might be a good idea to discuss how we can effectively log bugs too. I am wondering whether we should create a shared Jira space... or perhaps a public Trello board (not as pro as Jira but better than our issue tracker)?

In reply to by mike320

My problem with the current issue tracker is that it is poor at keeping track of bugs, as well as prioritising and assigning them. I'd love to spend time improving what we have to be able to do that but I don't see us being able to make those changes before the release of MS4.

I would be inclined to prioritise effectiveness by setting up something temporary that focuses on the initial release. Not a long-term solution but massively helpful for an effort this big. Again, the issue tracker just isn't fit for that purpose right now. I'm wondering whether GitHub projects might be the answer?

In reply to by Tantacrul

My concern isn't putting it on Github or any other site. My concern is that it's easy for the average forum user to get to from the forums and it be easy for them to use. I don't mind directing people to the issue tracker, I do this almost daily but it needs to be as accessible as the current one. It would also be nice to be able to monitor the issue tracker from MuseScore.org rather than adding a site to monitor. People will put non bugs in the tracker rather than the forum and you want people like me to give them answers.

In reply to by mike320

I'm not talking about something for the general public to log issues.

I'm talking about managing the implementation of unfinished projects prior to release. Something that gives us an overview of what is left to do. Ideally, this could be one system which can do both (in the future) but that's not looking like something we can solve right away.

In reply to by Tantacrul

You said you needed to decide how to log bugs. Once the UI is hooked up people will start testing the program and wanting to report bugs for version 4. I think you want it to be easy to integrate the user reported bugs to your overview of what's left to do so the bugs we find can be fixed. I'm sure the inhouse programmers don't often look at the issue tracker. Right now that's because there are few version 4 bugs reported. I'll be surprised if they suddenly get into that habit when the number of version 4 bugs starts to grow.

In reply to by mike320

Internally, we're inevitably going to have two places to check for bugs that are assigned to us. That's just a reality, which I think we're OK with. We're going hell for leather on building up all the core components and UI right now, so inevitably, our eye is not on the issue tracker all that much right now (and also for the reason you mentioned). However, we do want to devise a system that will help us to get V4 out efficiently and we will adapt to that. Afterwards, we'll also be paying more attention to the issue tracker too. In addition, my job is going to gradually transition over to helping to manage bugs and poke people internally to work on them.

So, there are two ways I can think of for how we could do this:

1) Set up a space with permissions for the dev community, known testers & the internal team to keep track of bugs on MS4. This is a non-permanent solution to get us to the first release of 4 - an extension of our Telegram chat.

2) Activate the ability to assign bugs on the issue tracker (thanks Joachim, I didn't know about that) and see if it is useful. I'm assuming that would come with the ability for us to be able to arrive in the morning and find out what bugs are assigned to us? Let me chat with the internal devs about this. They'll probably have a few useful suggestions.

In reply to by Tantacrul

Hi Tantacrul,
I'm the manager of a developpers team and I get what you mean about bug tracking.
Here is my proposal:
-keep the forum as it is (almost, see further), as a bucket to collect bugs from people, allowing any advanced user to mark them as "by design", or duplicate, or whatever.
-next to that, open a "professional" (but simple, not Jira!) bug tracker, let's call it [B]
-readonly access to [B] must be public!
-next to MuseScore staff, give write access to [B] to advanced contributors (who says Marc? ;-) )
-add a new attribute to the forum bugs tracker entries called "[B]": not set (default) / Yes / No. Once set to Yes, the forum entry would be "closed" and contain a clear link to the generated [B] entry
-delete the forum "bugs discussion". Currently the process is: enter a potential bug in the forum bug discussion, if the discussion recognizes it as positive, enter it in the forum bug tracker. That process would become : question/not understanding: use normal forum (general discussion ?). You think it is a bug: go to the forum bug tracker immediately. There it will be recognized as a "true" bug (attribute [B] set to Yes) or not.

In reply to by frfancha

This sounds about right to me. I think the ability for the public to raise issues is different (but necessary) to the management of bugs between the internal team and the community. Git Hub Project seems to me to be an obvious candidate given how most of what we do is already handled there.

In reply to by Tantacrul

The issue tracker here used to have the functionality to assign issues to users, its purpose though got misunderstood quite often, so got removed. Maybe we can get it back and restrict its use to a certain set of users?
Classifying and prioritizing is something it can do already.

In reply to by Tantacrul

I was excited to start playing around with the 4.x builds.. heh. I'm being too impatient xD

Not sure what those "shared spaces" and "boards" are. I feel like everything should be in one place, the website. Maybe that's because it sounds convenient, at least on the common users' side?

The current tracker looks fine by me: we know which issues are still open and which are not, and we have filters. But maybe the things you mentioned have features the current tracker doesn't have?

Oh, what if every user was able to "pin" posts so they don't get lost into "My Posts"?

Btw I mentioned something, on the settings page, about the display (Display the name of the setting and next to it the path to the file/folder that is affected in gray color, similar to the invisible objects in scores). What do you think?

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