RFC: Enabling users to report issues with Plasma widgets

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Montag, 4. April 2016 19:06:40 CEST Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> challenge:
> 1. take your favourite Plasma widget
> 2. find a bug or idea for an improvement with it
> 3. report it to the maintainer of the widget
> 
> 1. & 2. are easy.
> But 3. is not easy at all.
> 
> Question:
> Are endusers supposed to report issues with Plasma widgets and get in
> contact with its developers, designers, translators?
> 
> If "of course, yes" then they need to be enabled & encouraged to do so.
> At least every XMLGUI-based QWidget app has "Help">"Report Bug...". IMHO
> there should be something similar for Widgets. And something like "About"
> info as well, to know who to talk to or where the widget is from and the
> version.
> 
> Right now an enduser has no single clue in the UI where to go to with any
> widget issues. As a widget developer I experience that as a big burden,
> because it prevents feedback from the average enduser. Which sucks.
> 
> Please comment on this. Once I know your ideas about that, I would consider
> pushing this further to the VDG, so they can draft a nice UX for that, one
> without bloating the UI but still being discoverable and useable.
> 
> 
> Motivation:
> By accident I discovered people talking on a forum about problems with the
> Addons Weather widget. I was going to tell them to pretty-please instead
> report their problems to upstream. Preparing that reply I then saw that lots
> of insider information is needed to get from the displayed widget name in
> the Plasma workspace to bugs.kde.org and then a product&component combo (if
> that even exists, only created the one for the Weather widget while looking
> for it, dumdidum). And contacting the developer or translator also needs
> lot of research before.

I fully agree that we need an "info page" for Plasmoids just like for any 
other application.
My first gut reaction would be to make it available from the settings, so that 
we don't have to add another context menu / plasmoid toolbar item.