Staying 3digit with open issues
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@rainova Am I understanding you correctly that you are for looking for a volunteer to make a config on github? If so, what should be the exact rules you propose this volunteer should configure?
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Just to motivate people, I took care of about 50 tonight!!
Admittedly, it was getting rid of duplicates, but hey, every bit helps!
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@ff03k64 said in Staying 3digit with open issues:
Just to motivate people, I took care of about 50 tonight!!
Admittedly, it was getting rid of duplicates, but hey, every bit helps!
:beaming_face_with_smiling_eyes:
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@ff03k64 Nice work. The "Out Of Memory Error"
https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/10114
seem like a lot of duplicates too. Whacking those issues into a single one would definitely help make things more manageable. Make it so one can find the unique issues easier anyway.I'm gonna try and kill some duplicates off myself soon. : )
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@beelee Some of the issues we won't be able to fix. "Out of Memory" has too many causes to solve unless we have some specific steps of when and how it happened. Was the person running 5 instances of TripleA? How many other apps were they using? How much memory did they already have?
Beyond this, TripleA uses some silly settings like min memory for the UI windows to then spawn a new process for the actual game. So even though the UI windows need maybe 32MB of memory, we allocate potentially half a gig or more. Before this gets into more of a rant, we are probably only going to solve maybe 5% of issues that come in. We really need to do be disciplined about letting some issues go.
Thus, any issue that does not have a save game attached to it, probably can go away. The effort to attach the save game is not justifiable if that time can be used to solve an entire other issue where someone took the effort to attach the save game.
Does the issue explain clearly and concisely what the problem is? If not, the time to clarify it also likely does not justify the time when that time can be spent fixing actual other issues.
I think the 'triage' task we have before us is basically to either try and get issues into such a state, where it is clear, has the save game that reproduces the problem exactly, or we be honest and close them.
Any error reports likely will be bulk closed on the next release. We do not need to spend very much time there.
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For automatic triaging - those would be github actions that can parse/scan the content of an issue and then automatically assign labels.
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@lafayette said in Staying 3digit with open issues:
Thus, any issue that does not have a save game attached to it, probably can go away.
Is it possible to have the automatic reports include a save game?
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@ff03k64 said in Staying 3digit with open issues:
That would be a feature request..
Github issues cannot have arbitrary binary content uploaded. We would need to upload the save game file to the server and then create a link to access the save game. Disk space becomes a big consideration, a thousand or so 5MB save games really add up.
Having automatic saves after an error has happened is only a partial win as well. Often we want to see the error happening so we can walk through the code to see what it is doing and how it is winding up in a bad state. Often we can see after the fact that things are in a bad state, the question is how. For a lot of cases as well, the issue report is more about game behavior and were not automatic uploads. Not to pick on anyone, we've examples where X rule is wrong, but no save game provided that has the setup so we can quickly observe the rule as-is-today, and then observe it following any fix. Of course a developer must do the above, so perhaps it also makes more sense why having a save game at that point, ready-to-go, would save a lot of effort. We also avoid various confusions too, often it's like "which round? Which unit? What did you do exactly? You did a 'combat', where, with what?"
This I think is getting away from it though. How do we better handle issues? What is our metric of success, the pain we mitigate by solving issues, the value we provide, the time it takes from open to close, the number of issues?
Second, how do we reduce the needed labor to handle issues, let alone solve them?
Often all problems are solved simply by solving problems.. If we could solve issues then they come in, then all these questions would be "how do we better manage a ticket queue of size 0?" At that point the answer is trivial, there is nothing to manage.
Some philosophies state that important issues will keep coming up. In this vein, close all issues and keep doing so until the team is able to keep net zero issues. Only then think about the backlog, if at all, because the important items will come up. In the meantime the effort we spend now is potentially just 'work about work.' I don't want to be defeatist here, at some point we need to consider the implications when we resolve fewer issues compared to how many are coming in.
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@lafayette said in Staying 3digit with open issues:
Some philosophies state that important issues will keep coming up. In this vein, close all issues and keep doing so until the team is able to keep net zero issues. Only then think about the backlog, if at all,
This seems a good idea to me. You'd still want to consolidate the same/similar ones into one issue or you'd just end up with a pile of them again until it's solved.
Think that would probably need to be done manually. Idk, maybe not
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Close the lot.
Why?
On the current very stable version of 2.5.22294 I would say almost all the map related errors are caused by the players themselves, not giving themselves a decent amount of RAM or a reboot before they play a game.However, I think the forum moderators probably know the real outstanding issues and they should drive any spare dev time.
Maybe the moderators collectively should between themselves pick the top 3 issues to be fixed, get the background and saved games from the player(s) for the dev, so the dev does not have to do it.
This way when a dev has spare time he has a list of just 3 real issues, with backgrounds, they can pick one of the 3 and fix it?
https://forums.triplea-game.org/tags/thedog
https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/3741/curated-best-top-maps-triplea-guides -
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@thedog said in Staying 3digit with open issues:
Maybe the moderators collectively should between themselves pick the top 3 issues to be fixed, get the background and saved games from the player(s) for the dev, so the dev does not have to do it.
I like this thinking. What if the top 3 are not easily fixed? Nonetheless, having a list of clean issues ready to be worked on would go a long way, I support anything that helps move us in that direction.
As an idea to consider: The 'projects' feature could be a way to help bucket and group items. Not all items need to be issues perhaps and can instead be converted to project cards (if there is not that much to have written, if the idea is still very early, and if there has not yet been much discussion). For example, we could have a project of 'improve game rules', 'improve game stability', etc.. Perhaps we could do a 'enhancements & features' one of some sort.
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Another idea, we could de-dupe problem reports on the 'major.minor' version instead of the also using the build number. EG: all 2.6 would be grouped together and de-duped.
Is there a way we can also improve the pre-release problems? It's disheartening to see people using prerelease, which is meant for essentially testers and just demo feedback, submitting bug reports but not following up with details. Notably, who they were that submitted the problem, how they got to the problem. EG: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/issues/10235
This kind of item really just clogs our queue as the problem is well known. Though, because we de-dupe based on full number, we get this brand new every time a new prerelease is downloaded and someone submits this.
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To reduce the use of pre-release problems we could;
- have an approved list of testers/demo users who can give feedback or are flagged as such and therefore have more weight
- Feedback must include a saved game
- All feedback fields must be filled in
Otherwise it will be rejected or just have less weight
Alternatively the feedback could be awarded points automatically for its content.
Points could be awarded for each field filled in, a saved gamed etc, so the best value feedback is displayed first and least point valued, displayed last. -
A team that evaluates/classifies issues would be a good idea.
This might be useful for separating issues from non-issues.
Sometimes users think they discovered e.g. a rules related issue when it was in fact their misunderstanding of the rules. Also we can sort out problems on the user side, unrelated to the software. Just to name some examples...
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@panther I agree that we need such a team and we have touched on that concept in several threads. Resolving issues before they even go further into the queue helps everyone. Identifying misunderstandings is even good opportunities to build features that make rules more clear (eg: warning prompts, notices, toggle settings to turn on/off rule variants etc..) Basically along the philosophy: "the user is not dumb, it's the software's UX that is dumb."
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This is the team of 'triagers', currently called 'community' that can do triage of issues: https://github.com/orgs/triplea-game/teams/community/members
I'm interested in formalizing this more and adding more volunteers who can help keep the issue queue well organized.
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This PR will help with the missing image reports: https://github.com/triplea-game/triplea/pull/10257
We can close the missing image reports in the meantime (ideally fix them, though it is stop gap until we complete a longer term solution for missing images).
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How do we go to the next steps of having a 'triage' team? Shall we do a roll call of who is interested?
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@lafayette @Panther @panther2 @beelee
I would rather focus on solving the issues on a code base and ask you to participate in the triage process. Would that be okay for you guys? -
@frigoref I'm in the same camp and would prefer to wear fewer hats. Without volunteers, all tasks fall on the maintainers, and again we get back into a pattern where the maintainers are too busy with overhead to actually do anything to move the project forward (this has been a problem repeatedly for the last 12-15 years for this project).
Failing a decent set of volunteers, we'll have to go back to draconian measures like blanket closing old issues, blanket closing issues that are not fully spelled out with clear reproduction cases, etc.. Those measures were very unpopular and created antagonism between those reporting any issues and us who are stuck spending excessive time just understanding what the problem is and recreating it. (CC: @Cernel because you were perhaps the most vocal opponent of the 'ice-boxed issues)
I think the question remains, who can volunteer to do this triage? What are the next steps to get this group off the ground and running?
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