Open Bugs and Issue Tracker

I appreciate having this forum for documentation feedback, but it seems like the current existing methods would be sufficient if documentation fixes were a priority.

There are currently more than 100 open documentation bugs in the issue tracker. Based on my experience there must be hundreds more that are open but only visible to the submitter because they haven't moved to the public tracker. There's no need for complex system testing or regression on documentation bugs, so why do these get hung up in the submission process for months? If submitted bugs were actually added to the public issue tracker where they can be voted on we might not even need this forum.

 

The documentation bug reports that we get vary greatly in nature and scope. Sometimes we get things like "docs for feature XXX are not good enough" or even "not enough script ref pages have code samples" (ie, very broad, generic observations about the docs that don't have any fix other than an ongoing effort). At the other end of the scale, we get reports of individual spelling mistakes and broken links; while we can and do fix these cases, they are really just symptoms of a general problem that we already know about (ie, we could benefit from spelling and link checkers).

The idea of having a docs section on the forum is partly to avoid repeated instances of bug cases like this. Also, when someone submits a report saying "docs for XXX are inadequate", it is useful if the ensuing discussion can be held in public. There are cases where the issue is simply a code sample or description that contains obsolete or incorrect information. These are fairly clear-cut "bugs", although as you say, they don't require the same reproduction and confirmation effort that is applied to software bugs. However, in most cases, documentation issues are not really "bugs" at all and treating them as though they are seems to be unproductive.

Of course, it is still fine to submit doc issues via the standard bug reporter but we are trying the forum section out as a way to streamline the doc quality process, promote discussion where necessary and give more direct feedback.