Bugbustus

• Approaching Grav 2.0, open issues/bugs and the Grav Open Collective *

Of course we are all looking forward to Grav 2.0 which will undoubtedly bring a lot of new and useful features. At the same time there are still some rather stubborn issues that for some reason 'survived' quite a lot of new releases since the moment they were created.

One such an issue/bug is that making a file upload field in a form mandatory (by setting required: true), prevents the form to be submitted and effectively renders the whole form useless. This issue was first created in November 2016 (Form Plugin #106, then followed by #116, Grav Core #1217 and Admin Plugin #887 )).

Some of us (and unfortunately too few) are Grav Open Collective Backers and support the Grav development through a monetary donation, either perio dically or as a one time donation.

I would like to suggest some way of letting the Backers vote and thus prioritise which issues they/we would like to see fixed in the core and plugins by Team Grav when Grav 2.0 is released. The current fund available is very limited, but spending it on bug fixes serves at least two purposes:

1. the development and quality of Grav is enhanced
2. the involvement of the Grav community may get higher
   which in turn might and hopefully lead to more Backers, greater funding etc.

That is why I would like to introduce the new term "Bugbustus" which stands for bug busting by all of us in August.
BTW in Dutch (my native language) the name of the month August is "augustus" which is probably how and why Bugbustus as a mixed Dutch-English acronym sprang to my mind :)

Any reactions are welcome !

For sure, there's some cleanup in resilient issues that perhaps should be prioritised ahead of a major release. Some concerted effort by those of us who contribute to development and support but not directly involving in developing v2 might help kickstart Bugbustus even now, to help clear the path for a graceful landing later in the year. I'm happy to be pinged for testing or development-support where needed, and regularly spend some time traversing the repositories for issues that can be resolved with a helpful comment.

My understanding has been that hiring TrilbyMedia is an avenue to directly have a feature developed for Grav, or some issue resolved, as this development contributes to core. The OpenCollective funds are slowly rising, but as yet there is no budgeting of what in particular they will be spent on. Other than the general category of "Development", perhaps donations and attention would increase if some future targets were included there? Eg., the G SoC 2016 goals are fine candidates for this, though like general development quantifying the cost of these improvements is hard.

I think some 'hackathon' type events (virtual to start) might be in order to get some developers together and work on knocking out some of these stubborn bugs. Of course informal community bug fixing is always appreciated. There are some folks that do provide PRs, but really I would love to see more community involvement in the issue tracker. Some times i feel like a bug won't get fixed unless we do it, but really there's no reason why others cannot contribute to bug fixing too.

Regarding the OpenCollective funding. We've not needed to draw on it yet, but there will be a time when we need to submit bills for hosting and other services. Also I am hoping to be able to promote Grav in some open source conferences and "get the word out". Perhaps we'll spend some of the funds on some Grav swag to give out to Grav users. Any other ideas for uses of the funds?

One idea for the fund that struck me: Open Source "Bounties". I've seen quite a few open-source projects use services like Bountysource.com to outsource specific issue to get fixed or features to get implemented. A benefit of this is that the core team can curate prioritized issues/features to list using the fund, but the community can also list their own backed with their own funds. Seems rather well organized.

Not a bad idea too :)

As most of the people here know, I can help solving some urgent issues, too. You can ping me at any time. But be aware my responding may vary between hours till days.

But the biggest at the moment for me is to find to find out, which issues are most important. Even for my plugins I don't get any feedback to prioritize things. One step would be to add some +1 to the most pressing issues. This clutters the issue timeline a bit, but may help to clarify things.

Also a reputation system would be good. Currently, it is not possible thank people and what should be most important, that Grav Team honours the contributions of the community. It doesn't suffice imo to mention them somewhere in the changelog or that they can been seen somewhere in the contribution list. They should be at least attributed somewhere.

Grav Team honours the contributions of the community. It doesn't suffice imo to mention them somewhere in the changelog or that they can been seen somewhere in the contribution list. They should be at least attributed somewhere

Good point!