At the moment Adobe are giving out a whole load of JIRA love, the bug tracking system available from Atlassian (and quite understandably, it’s a cracking product) with the presence of their Flex bug tracker, and now, their Flash player system.
After a quick twitter conversation, it would appear that there is a lot of demand for a ColdFusion bug tracker, so we, the community, can communicate our issues and ideas back to the developers as we need. The end result can only be a better, more robust, stable, and capable product for all.
Historically, these trackers have only been available during product alphas and betas, using the old mmbeta.macromedia.com system, which to be honest, is a pile of cack. However, regardless of how bad the tracker, that communication was still in place.
So, come on Adobe, give us a bug tracker. Transparency is the key.
If anyone agrees, please leave a comment below - consider this a petition.
Since Adobe ColdFusion is the de facto standard driving the CFML language forward, it would be great to see it embrace a public issue tracking system with which ‘the community’ could communicate with the ColdFusion application developers.
Clearly Adobe are hesitant at providing this functionality, possibly because of potential abuse or the negativity associated with an innundation of bug reports. Either way, it really is a must especially considering more high-profile products like Flex and Flash have such systems.
Is the lack of a public bug tracker an indication that Adobe has ColdFusion on the back-burner? Do they feel that competing products like Blue Dragon and Railo may get some good marketing stats, or indeed, ideas, out of such a system?
Completely agree… I’d love to see a public bug tracker / feature request list
And I’d love to see them use LighthousePro. But I’m a bit biased.
+1
I think the vast majority of CF developers out there would love to have the ability to, not just see what’s in the bug tracker, but to track what happened to bug(s) they submitted.
Currently, they just seem to disappear into a void. Sure, behind the scenes the CF team are doing something with them, but… well, I just never have like the old /go/wish URL.
A public bug tracker would be a good move by Adobe for ColdFusion.
OpenBD will have one… (stirr stirr)
Why don’t we take a leaf out of Jim Priest’s book and run a public bug tracker in parallel? - Jim duplicated Adobe’s CF IDE survey so the community can get an idea of the results http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/04/09/the-open-cfml-ide-survey/
The CF community can remind each other to report bugs on the community CF bug tracker so we all know what’s going on. We could add comments and include workarounds if we find any which would be brilliant if you find yourself banging your head against a wall.
After a new CF release or hotfix a volunteer can go through the bugs and click on “fixed”. If Adobe realise the public version is well regarded, regularly indexed(!) and bug free(!) then maybe they’d adopt it or improve their own version and make it public.
Agree strongly. I find the bods on the beta programmes very responsible (even if the responses aren’t always “yes” ;-), but in between times I really feel like the bug “tracking” process is just a black hole.
I feel stupid suggesting to people on the Adobe Forums that they should make sure to log bugs if they come across them, because if they ask “well what happens when I do that?”, as my response can only really be “err… dunno actually… but like you should just do it anyway”. Not very convincing.
On thing I find most useful with client-facing bug trackers is that one can at least save some time when wondering “is this a bug?”, as one can go and find out “yes, it is” (if it’s already logged, I mean), which reduces the time wasted investigating this sort of thing.
–
Adam
Actually I dunno if they’re “responsible” or not. But I meant to say “responsive”.
Grumble. Just reading your sticky:
“Please double check your comments before submit”.
–
Adam
They could just open up another section of the already existing bugs.adobe.com site…
Something very unexpected happened this week. I logged a bug on the public Adobe bug & wish list page - which usually feels like it goes into a black hole once you click on submit. But within an hour I received an email from one of the Adobe CF developers responding to my bug report. I presume he was part of the new team in India. Well done to them!
Interestingly I discovered an undocumented bug fix in 8.01 which I first thought was a new bug in 8.01. Aparently the pagetype=”a4″ attribute in cfdocument produces fonts that are about 3pt sizes too big in CF7 and CF8.0. But this is fixed in 8.01. As a result our CSS had to be changed because suddenly when 8.01 was installed our cfdocuments were rendered with tiny, unreadable text.
Naughty Adobe for not mentioning that anywhere in the release notes. If they had a public bug tracker then perhaps I could have found that out by searching before reporting a bug and spending a whole day trying to find out exactly where the fault was.
A definite yes to that !
So is this happening or are we all just stroking ourselves?
Completely agree. Which is why we announced that we were working on a public bug tracker at CFUnited and Scotch on the Rocks.
We just don’t want to give you something that is “a pile of cack”. 
Stay tuned.
Jason
@jason
thanks for commenting. remember that most of us can’t make it to cfunited or sotr so announcements like needs to be conveyed to the community through the blogs. someone like ben forta, damon cooper, hell every adobe needs to get the word out to the rest of us. it’s sad that we have to attend an event in order to get the answers we’re looking for.