Reporting bugs on experimental features is really convoluted right now

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The spark for this topic came about after I made some bug reports lately and got this message from one of the devs in this thread:

https://developer.blender.org/T98179

This hasn’t been designed or implemented. It should be done as part of the paint mode.
You’re are testing an experimental feature. Currenlty 3d texture painting supports basic strokes and undo/redo.
At this time we cannot accept any bugs via the bug tracker as most have not been developed and should be tagged as todos if it fits within the design otherwise closed/archived. As the design is currenlty unclear of paint mode (the main reason why it is an experimental feature)

I honestly have to ask, what is even the point in having the experimental features tested and report on bugs/missing features if I can’t even report those that have been accepted into the master branch?

I was also given zero information on where I should direct my feedback and the bug reporter is literally the only direct link to talking to the devs as a regular user.

Frankly, something needs to be done about this. Some of my reports were practically dismissed because they were not given in a very specific way that I didn’t even know about until I was told on BlenderArtists to go to Blender.chat in the Sculpt-Paint-Dev channel as an alternative. Seems overly complicated for reporting that swapping colours are not syncing between different Blender windows.

My own suggestion would be to separate experimental feature bug reports from the rest in the bug tracker on developer.blender.org and direct those reports by adding a new button inside Blender called “Report an Experimental Bug”. This way it is clear how to leave feedback as a tester.

If fixing the bug tracker is not feasible, at least have a direct link to some feedback forum/chat for each experimental feature where we can write down proper feedback. The only links given inside Blender for experimental features are design documents on the very website I and many users have been told on multiple occasions NOT to leave feedback on.

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Fix this issue and there will likely be less conversations like the one I had in that thread.

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I agree. If you don’t mind I’ve moved this to a more relevant section, because the Site Feedback section is meant for feedback about this devtalk.blender.org site.

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Thanks for moving it! I tried finding the correct forum for it to be posted, but couldn’t, so I put it under Site Feedback just because it was related to Blender’s official websites for leaving feedback. :smiley:

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I also find Blender’s handling of bug reports (in general) to be extremely awkward, especially compared to other open source projects.

Other projects generally have a single bug tracker (usually on GitHub), where they combine both feature requests and bug reports.

They then use labels to organize things so that developers can focus on the things they care about (e.g. high priority bugs, crashes, bugs that must be fixed before the next release, etc.)

This makes it easy for people to search through the bug tracker, because everything is in one place. And there isn’t any ambiguity about where the user should submit bug reports.

Of course Blender is a quite large project, but even large projects like TypeScript, React, etc. use the above format. I’ve contributed to many dozens of open source projects, and they’ve all had sane bug reporting workflows.

Meanwhile, Blender has a very ad-hoc way of doing things, there are at least 3 different places where bugs must be reported, and the user has no way to know which of those 3 places is correct.

Even things which are clearly bugs are not allowed in the bug tracker because they aren’t currently being worked on by anybody. But the user can’t know that ahead of time. And if the user gets it “wrong” then the bug report is closed with a curt message.

The experience of reporting bugs to Blender is really bad, far worse than any other open source project I’ve ever seen. I understand that there will be a lot of non-technical people making bad bug reports, but I don’t think that’s an excuse to have a bad bug tracking workflow.

I think it’s reasonable to have two websites (one for bugs, and one for feature requests), however right now many things which are clearly bugs are still considered “feature requests” by the Blender developers, which is very frustrating for users.

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