I recently reported that exceptions reported through the plugin in the plugin marketplace are unreadable, because they never load the actual stack trace.
I am looking at freezes now, while they do load - I see that “Daily statistics” show some freezes occurring in September too.
However, the last report I can actually access is From August 31st.
Is this intended? Or is there also something broken/not working as intended?
And is something like a “resolve” button that currently exists for Exceptions also planned?
And while I am at it:
What is the difference between Unsorted and Total? Is sorting to be something users do manually? Or does the system auto-sort the freezes when it can somehow?
I really appreciate the care you are putting into developing new features.
But recently exceptions were added, that now are broken (even though they used to work). A few days ago the Freezes tab appeared:
- No explanation or announcement coming alongside it (if I just missed it then my apologies on this point)
- No way to manually sort through the freezes or clear them so that I can make sense of what I addressed and what still needs attention
- No way to easily download all reports (inspecting them through the browser is difficult, I need to move them into my IDE to properly check everything, downloading incident by incident isn’t it)
- The display of the freeze incidents is either broken, or unintuitive (either it is intended to show how many freezes happened in the graph, but some may not be readable to me for whatever reason in the left pane - or the graph is meant to map 1:1 with the number of freezes I see as readable, something is off.)
A few months bag there were several incidents where download statistics went out and weren’t updating for us through the dashboard…
It kind of starts seeming like occasionally changes are made to prod that aren’t properly tested/verified. This could be acceptable, if we had an easy way to reach the developers and get quick fixes/answers.
But that isn’t the case. When something breaks it can be days before someone acknowledges it, if it is simpler (like downloads) it may get fixed rather fast. If is is more complex, all of us see broken and unfinished Exceptions/Freezes tab and those who don’t ask/read the discussions here are just left with a half-broken, half-finished dashboard for weeks.
And again this isn’t meant to be some rant, trash talk or whatever else negative. I’m genuinely grateful for the work people at JetBrains put into this, from creating the plugin ecosystem, the somewhat recent transition from slack to a fully fledged community to daily moderation of it here.
I appreciate that new features like the Exceptions/Freeze tab are being developed, I’m grateful grateful for the recent editing of plugin descriptions through the marketplace dashboard or the verifier updates and so on.
I’m just saying that it feels like there is a significant lack of transparency and communication between the JB team responsible for the marketplace ecosystem (specifically the marketplace, not really as much the SDK itself) and plugin developers.
Be it the things breaking without much transparency or accountability being shown publicly, half-finished features shipping or responses to issues raised by us being vague, taking long, or just never really appearing
For example the recent Concerns around a paid plugin author uploading opensource plugins, which was around for long enough to have at least received a generic “We are looking into this situation and will update you as soon as we can”, or the plugin-cracking situation which is also barely having anything done about it.
And I understand if there aren’t enough people to do fast iterative development, I understand if everyone is busier with higher-priority things meaning that it just takes time for things to get fixed, I understand all of that.
And I would have no problem with that being the case if we got more transparency in return:
- Some changelog of marketplace changes, at least brief introductions to new changes
- Perhaps a banner about a known ongoing incident in Exceptions/Freezes when things are broken
- Some noticeboard (or perhaps the changelog) where fixed incidents would be addressed post mortem
- Hopefully more responsiveness for issues opened here. If something has to be decide internally, if there is something we can’t know because legal/NDA etc. I understand, but saying so doesn’t seem like a crime, I think everyone here would much more appreciate if requests got denied with “Not now, higher priority things, please bring this up later” or “We need to reach an internal decision first, it may take time because x” something like that.
A lot of the time it feels like no one cares when we bring up issues - it could be different if we got at least some responses, even if negative/uncertain ones like I said above.