hledger/doc/ISSUES.md
2024-01-27 13:31:01 -10:00

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Issues

The hledger project's issue tracker is on github. It contains:

  • BUG issues - failures in some part of the hledger project (the main hledger packages, docs, website..)
  • WISH issues - feature proposals, enhancement requests
  • uncategorised issues - we don't know what these are yet
  • pull requests - proposed changes to code and docs

Here are some shortcut urls:

Open issues

By topic and type.

COMPONENT/TOPIC BUGS WISHES PRS OTHER
all bugs wishes PRs other
Tools:
install bugs wishes PRs other
cli bugs wishes PRs other
ui bugs wishes PRs other
web bugs wishes PRs other
Input/output Formats:
journal bugs wishes PRs other
timeclock bugs wishes PRs other
timedot bugs wishes PRs other
csv bugs wishes PRs other
json bugs wishes PRs other
html bugs wishes PRs other
sql bugs wishes PRs other
Commands:
accounts bugs wishes PRs other
activity bugs wishes PRs other
add bugs wishes PRs other
aregister bugs wishes PRs other
balance bugs wishes PRs other
balancesheet bugs wishes PRs other
balancesheetequity bugs wishes PRs other
cashflow bugs wishes PRs other
check bugs wishes PRs other
close bugs wishes PRs other
codes bugs wishes PRs other
commodities bugs wishes PRs other
demo bugs wishes PRs other
descriptions bugs wishes PRs other
files bugs wishes PRs other
import bugs wishes PRs other
incomestatement bugs wishes PRs other
notes bugs wishes PRs other
payees bugs wishes PRs other
prices bugs wishes PRs other
print bugs wishes PRs other
register bugs wishes PRs other
rewrite bugs wishes PRs other
roi bugs wishes PRs other
stats bugs wishes PRs other
tags bugs wishes PRs other
Miscellaneous:
bounty bugs wishes PRs other
budget bugs wishes PRs other
doc bugs wishes PRs other
i18n bugs wishes PRs other
interest bugs wishes PRs other
investing bugs wishes PRs other
ledger-compat bugs wishes PRs other
packaging bugs wishes PRs other
performance bugs wishes PRs other
period-expressions bugs wishes PRs other
queries bugs wishes PRs other
regression bugs
security bugs wishes PRs other
site bugs wishes PRs other
tools bugs wishes PRs other
valuation bugs wishes PRs other

Some loose conventions:

  • In bug titles, mention the hledger version in which the bug first appeared (and avoid mentioning version numbers otherwise). This allows searches like new issues in 1.22 and regressions in 1.22

Labels

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/labels, also listed at open issues above, are used to categorise:

  • whether an issue is a bug (red) or a wish (pink)
  • related subcomponents (tools, commands, input/output formats) (light blue)
  • related general topics (light green)
  • related platforms (light purple)
  • whether a bounty has been offered (dark green)
  • why an issue is blocked (dark grey) or was closed (black)
  • low priority info, like "imported" (white)

Labels can also be used as prefixes in issue/PR titles, as prefixes in commit messages, etc.

Custodians

If you are interested in helping with a particular component for a while, please add yourself as a custodian in Open Issues table above. A custodian's job is to help manage the issues, rally the troops, and drive the open issue count towards zero. The more custodians, the better! By dividing up the work this way, we can scale and make forward progress.

Milestones and Projects

Milestones are used a little bit to plan releases. In 2017 we experimented with projects, but in 2018 milestones are in favour again..

Estimates

You might see some experiments in estimate tracking, where some issue names might have a suffix noting estimated and spent time. Basic format:

ESTIMATEDTOTALTASKTIME\|TIMESPENTSOFAR

hours estimated, no time spent [..] half an hour estimated (a dot is ~a quarter hour, as in timedot format) [1d] one day estimated (a day is ~4 hours) [1w] one week estimated (a week is ~5 days or ~20 hours) [3|2] three hours estimated, about two hours spent so far

1\|1w\|2d

two days spent so far ``` Estimates are always for the total time cost (not time remaining). Estimates are not usually changed, a new estimate is added instead. Numbers are very approximate, but better than nothing.

Trello

The trello board (trello.hledger.org) is an old collection of wishlist items. This should probably be considered deprecated.

Prioritising

https://lostgarden.home.blog/2008/05/20/improving-bug-triage-with-user-pain/ describes an interesting method of ranking issues by a single "User Pain" metric. What adaptation of this might be useful for the hledger project ?

Here's a simplified version, currently being tested in the hledger issue tracker:

Two labels can be applied to bug reports, each with levels from 1 to 5:

Impact

Who is likely to be affected by this bug ?

  • impact5: Affects all users.
  • impact4: Affects most users.
  • impact3: Affects a minority of users.
  • impact2: Affects only packagers or developers.
  • impact1: Affects almost no one.

Severity

To people affected, how serious is this bug ?

  • severity5: Data loss or privacy/security loss bug.
  • severity4: Regression, crash or major usability/doc bug.
  • severity3: Installability, packaging or new user experience bug. A potential user could fail to get started.
  • severity2: Minor/moderate usability/doc bug. Easy to avoid or not a big deal.
  • severity1: Cleanup/design/developer bug. Significant only to developers and design-minded users.

User Pain

The bug's User Pain score is Impact * Severity / 25, ranging from 0.04 to 1.

Then, practices like these are possible:

  • All open bugs can be listed in order of User Pain (AKA priority).
  • Developers can check the Pain List daily and fix the highest pain bugs on the list.
  • The team can set easy-to-understand quality bars. For example, they could say “In order to release, we must have no open bugs with more than 15 pain.”
  • If there are no bugs left above the current quality bar, they can work on feature work.
  • If a bug is found that will take more than a week to fix, it can be flagged as a killer bug, for special treatment.