Our Policy on Issues

[LeoNatan]

General Policy

In this project, our preferred focus with respect to the issue tracker is mainly on 2 things:

1. Bug reports
2. Feature/enhancement requests

Nevertheless, we do allow for requests for help to be posted on any general matter, but with some caveats - please read below.

Before submitting a new issue, be sure to select the best option in the new-issue form.

🛟 Using issues for getting help

The Detox project is maintained by a core-team of domain experts, that is powerful, yet minimal in size. While we care a lot about the community and our users' success, our first commitment is to push the project forward by focusing on innovation and new, large-scale features.

For getting help with specific things such as integrating Detox in your project or running it on a specific CI SaaS, it would make a better idea to first approach our Discord community or posting Stack-Overflow, as suggested by the issue submission form.

For removing personal blockers or for contributing back to the community by improving Detox - namely, by introducing new API's or specific bug fixes, please consider onboarding the project contribution and submitting a fully-fledged pull request. Improvement suggestions are more likely to fall between the cracks.

Before submitting a pull request, please voice your suggested idea as an issue, to allow for a discussion with the maintainers.

⚠️ Detox is a community project, and everyone is a potential maintainer. Making an impact is under everyone's responsibility. 🙏🏻

🤖 Automations

We do our best to go over issues and pull requests and tag them as accurately as possible, and through that - provide a solution as fast as possible. However, we are a small team and have limited capacity; We even often have other projects we are working on. Therefore, we utilize some automations rules to help us run things more smoothly, nonetheless:

1. Support: When it comes to general questions and requests for help, we initially review the issue, but may often find that posting them on Stack Overflow - the ultimate Q&A platform, would be more suitable. Detox even has its own designated detox label. When that happens, we mark issue with a special label, and a bot provides all the necessary info through a comment.

2. Stale: Issues and pull requests that become inactive for too long get marked as stale. This is a wake up call for both us as maintainers and the issue reporter that attention is required. If applicable, feel free to post new comments on the issue in order to "unstale" it. In any case, anything that's stale for too long gets closed (but not locked!).

3. No Response: In order to be able to help - especially with bugs, we require some information from your side. Sometimes that can be overwhelming, but the fact of the matter is that in this complex project, too little info makes it extremely difficult to help out. In those cases, we mark issues with a special label, requesting you to fill in the missing pieces. As we have no other choice, this starts a countdown for the issue to be closed, unless more info is provided.

4. Lock: Quite rarely, after long periods of inactivity, closed issues and pull requests will also be locked.

Bots that run these behind the scenes: Support, No Response, Stale, Lock

Note that no system is perfect, and sometimes things fall between the cracks. Feel free to ping us when necessary.

Thank you for using Detox!

[JanithaR]

I don't see the point of having the option to select 'I need help with Detox' when creating an issue.
https://imgur.com/a/abTlKjX

If you guys are too busy or out of manpower then don't let people create issues that belong to this category at all just to have that tagged and closed by a bot. It creates unnecessary confusion and misunderstanding.

[LeoNatan]

That button is my devious plot to deter people from openening fake "issues". Help requests should not be open here. It's effective: https://github.com/wix/Detox/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+label%3A%22type%3A+question%2Fstack+overflow%22

Before we had this template, people would open "bugs" and ask how to do things, at which point we'd put the label and have the bot close it.

Since the bot explains exactly why it's closing the issue, I don't see why it's confusing. I also added a link to this discussion recently.

[JanithaR]

The confusion comes from letting the issue be open for commenting I guess. If it's an 'I Need Help with Detox' question then just close it and lock it then and there.

[LeoNatan]

Before the current templates, we had the normal template which would tell people not to ask usage questions: https://github.com/wix/Detox/blob/master/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md
Of course, they'd just ignore it and ask anyway.

The current method is effective.