[Qt-interest] (Qt support salesforce "downgrade", bug priorities) (was Qt for the iPad?)

[Ross Bencina]

Thiago Macieira <thiago at kde.org> wrote:
>I am not the person to talk to about this. If you have problems with 
>support,
>it's with support as well as your sales manager you need to discuss. My 
>work
>doesn't go near any of their work.

Thanks Thiago, most of this isn't aimed at you then (except the next bit 
about bug priorities) but I think its important to be able to discuss Qt 
support with other Qt customers in public...

>As for fixing bugs, that's about priorities: yours and ours will not always
>match. The team has a lot to do and fixing the P0s and P1s as well as 
>getting
>the releases out are very important. (Where P1 means "will stop the release
>from happening" and P0 means "stops Qt development itself so stop whatever
>you're doing and do this NOW")

While we're on the topic of bug classification... I would like to see any 
cosmetic rendering bug which makes an app look broken (ie badly computed 
update rects which break redraws) raised to P0. I have had support tell me 
that rendering bugs will not be fixed in a minor update because they are not 
"critical" enough. This is completely unacceptable. What commercial app 
would ship with a redraw bug -- like lines corrupting a widget due to 
un-updated regions when scrolling? Would you go out in public with a black 
line painted accross your face? In the past I've seen this in QTableView and 
currently I have a similar update issue in QGraphicsView  in 4.6.2 (bug 
report on the way..)


>Em Terça-feira 13. Abril 2010, às 14.05.57, Christian Dähn escreveu:
>> Sorry for my off topic statement here - but Qt "support" isn't what I've
>> been used to for years (working with Qt since year 2000).
>>
>> Currently I only get support via the buggy and customer-unfriendly
>> "Customer portal", where it's not possible to set issues as "solved" or 
>> to
>> reply issues, further the issue messages are limited in size and thus
>> leads to support answers cutted away (nearly all support guys reply in 
>> the
>> bottom of the quoted message).

I have also complained to support about this "downgrade" from the previous 
*excellent* email based support system to the terrible salesforce portal. I 
agree with Jason H that the old support@ email address was excellent. The 
support engineers are excellent, and I have been very happy with Qt support.


>As for the website, it's salesforce.com. Maybe email would be easier for 
>you,
>but not for the engineers who need to deal with a good quantity of cases, 
>plus
>search them all as a knowledge base.

Are you saying "Maybe a better customer support system would be better for 
our customers but actually our engineers are more important" ?

The support system is for supporting customers... surely Qt can make things 
work for engineers _and_ customers.


>> Further I've to take care that I don't ask too many questions, because 
>> more
>> than 10 in a year have to be paid to additionally. And even if I found
>> real bugs, a bug request can take weeks until anybody takes care of it -
>> just saying: it could maybe fixed within some future release...
>
>Commercial support is not incident-based. It's unlimited.

That's good to hear, but its not what the last documentation I saw said --  
I've also been worrying about this 10-issue limit. I must have mis-read 
something or the documentation was unclear.


> Please change (repair) your user unfriendly support portal and find back 
> to
> your direct and customer friendly support (ehm: did I mention that I'm
> talking about PAID support?).

+10.


>Our in-house solution was past due-date to be replaced. Fixing the current 
>one
>probably involves either switching away from salesforce.com to something 
>else,
>or having SF do the work. Either way, it's not immediate. But feedback is
>important, so I did forward your email to the support lead.

I think I've raised these issues with support in the past, but please feel 
free to forward..

Ok, I'll be quiet now. thanks..

Ross