Cura issue policies

[Dim3nsioneer 557]

Maybe some of you have seen it as well on Github. Quite a lot of open Cura issues have been closed today by Nallath. There also seem to be new / modified issue policies since today / yesterday.

As Cura gets a new GUI, I can understand that issues which will be solved by implementing this new GUI are closed.

For some of the closed issues, the relationship to the GUI is obvious, for others it is not (at least not for me).

Thus, I would like to express my slight concern about this 'new' way to deal with issues submitted by the community. I hope, that Ultimaker is following the up to present path of improving the software together with the community.

If this is the case, the Cura road map, which is mentioned in the issue policies, should maybe be published. If it is already, Daid and Nallath, please provide a link.

I think everybody is aware who has written this excellent software called Cura (for the few ones who don't: Thanks Daid!). However it might not be completely unfair to say that this community had its share in the success of Cura. And I guess many of us, including me, would be glad to help improving it further. Please let us. Thanks!

 

[nallath 1,124]

I've made these policies together with Daid, due to the large number (eg; 200+) issues on the github. Most of these issues were vague, already fixed or will be resolved by the new GUI.

I don't quite see what there is to be concerned about. Instead of random answers to issues, there are clearer rules on what we would like to see in issues and when / how they will be closed.

The community is free to implement or recomend new features, but simply put; "Ideas are cheap". I'm not working fulltime on Cura and neither is Daid. So we have to select which suggestions to implement.

 

[Daid 306]

The roadmap is in my inbox. It's private for a couple of good reasons. One of them being that you cannot hold me to it. (Select-able support material has been on it for 6 months already, and has been pushed back a few times)

The other is time. Some features are 3 words on the roadmap, but require a lot of words and pictures to explain. I pretty much could fill a full time job by just writing out the roadmap in a way that people outside of Ultimaker would understand it.

Nallath, my trusted minion, and colleague, is working trough the whole issue list, closing just about anything to clean it up. If you think something is closed but should not be closed, feel free to open it again and state why.

There where 300+ open issues. So this is the quickest way to clean them up.

How we are planning to deal with incoming issues on the issue tracker is stated at:

https://github.com/daid/Cura/wiki/Issue-policies

We're currently working on totally re-doing some major parts of the code. That's why the issue list is cleaned up. This to incorporate all the things we've learned the last 2 years. The code base was still based on the early stuff I made when I started Cura. Due to the added features it started to grow into a mess.

This new GUI, with new underlying code, will have much better support for different machines and different user requirements. We have some great ideas for this that I do not want to spoil yet.

The new code can be followed on the PinkUnicorn branch. It's currently nowhere near functional, but if you dive into the code you can see things we are doing with scenes, machines, views and tools to structure everything better.

 

[nallath 1,124]

I didn't get my pineapple this month. You're not allowed to call me minion