Redesign the issue reporting system

[ctrueden]

Fiji has a Bug Submitter for the Fiji BugZilla. We want to retire this, in favor of general SciJava functionality: a new issue reporting system, which interfaces with GitHub Issues—and the potential to write additional plugins, too. It could live in scijava-common, or a scijava-issues component if there are new dependencies. And a UI would exist in scijava-ui-swing. The issue reporter would support reporting bugs against components (i.e., JAR files) which have embedded Maven POMs that specify an issueManagement section with a compatible issue tracker. And of course there would be reasonable defaults—e.g., ImageJ would be configured to use imagej/imagej by default if the user does not specify a component.

[ctrueden]

A related question for @melissalinkert and @joshmoore: I would like to unify how users report "Fiji Bio-Formats" issues with the standard Bio-Formats bug reporting process. To that end: after we have updated ImageJ's bug submitter plugin to send bug reports to GitHub issues, would it be OK to keep a "Bio-Formats" component listed in the UI, and point it at https://github.com/openmicroscopy/bioformats/issues? Or would you prefer to have an email-based submission to ome-users or OME QA? In principle, either would be doable, though extra work on top of the GitHub Issues mechanism of course.

[melissalinkert]

@ctrueden: Thanks - GitHub issues are fine with us, as we already receive some feedback there.

[imagejan]

In connection with this plan, I suggest to setup issue templates on the relevant projects to improve the chances that newcomers will submit all the relevant information to reproduce reported issues.

[sylvielgki]

Dear all
I end up here after many precious minutes of trying to find out a way to report a Fiji bug. I finally understood that what you want is that I report it in Image.sc which is what I will do next. But first I would like to point out that it would be great if this was made clearer.
As an end user, I go to help/Report a bug. There I get a message that sends me to ImageJ.net/help where I go round and round until I finally create a Github account without knowing why. Then I get stuck with my new account and no link to follow to report my bug. So I google Report a fiji bug and find an angry conversation that finally sends me to this one.
My suggestion is to put the link image.sc under the Fiji/help. Thanks for considering.
Sylvie

[ctrueden]

@sylvielgki Thanks for the ping. I updated the Report a bug page on imagej.net to reflect that bug reports should go to the Image.sc Forum now. I also updated the Help page to have a separate "Reporting bugs" section, visible from the table of contents, that links to the "Report a bug" page more clearly.

I hope this helps, until we have a proper bug reporting plugin in place again someday.

[imagesc-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on Image.sc Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.image.sc/t/red-error-messages-when-copy-paste-code-into-the-script-editor/41394/4