Feature Request Guidelines

Feature requests are less critical to our operation than bug reports, and we are therefore commensurately less nitpicky about the whole process. Nevertheless, you increase the odds that someone might implement your brilliant new idea someday if you bear the following guidelines in mind when submitting new Feature Requests.

Check for Similar Feature Requests

• Go to our Feature Request tracker at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=4932&atid=354932

• Try to come up with a word or expression that anyone who submitted this idea previously would have used in the description. You have a better chance of finding the previous Feature Requests if you use terms that are as generic and simple as possible. SourceForge will not return any hits unless it finds all of the terms you enter in one of the Feature Request summaries, and it cannot search the text of the reports directly. Consequently, a search for “audio” or “audio segment” is more likely to find something than a search for “audio segment resize idea.” Bear in mind spelling differences between the US and the rest of the English speaking world as well. SourceForge won't find reports about “colour” that were submitted by an American who spelled it “color,” and so on.

• Input your search into the “Summary keyword:” box. Hit the “Browse” button.

• If there were no results, go back and try other keywords until you run out of ideas, or until you get sick of wrestling with the lousy search facility at SourceForge. We appreciate your making an effort to find existing reports, but we don't expect you to waste an hour of your life trying to coax something out of that admittedly very lame search facility either.

• If you did find a result, or results, read through the previous reports and see if your Feature Request is already described. If it is not described to your satisfaction, you can add additional comments to existing reports, if appropriate.

• If there is no previous work to draw on, then you should continue on to file a new Feature Request.

Submit a New Request

Once you have made a reasonable effort to ensure that you have discovered a new idea, then please continue with the following guidelines in mind.

Feature Requests to Avoid

Porting to Windows and doing a GTK2 rewrite have both been requested to death, and both are about as likely as waking up in the morning to find out your house transmuted into solid gold while you were sleeping. Requests involving dramatic and fundamental changes to the way Rosegarden behaves are very unlikely to be considered. We use Rosegarden too, and we mostly like it this way, and we mostly built it the way on purpose, so try to be realistic.

Don't Be a Nobody

Please take the time to create a SourceForge account for yourself and use it for submitting and tracking your Feature Requests. The process of working out an implementation of a new idea works best when you make yourself available for followup questions, and when you take an active interest in looking after your report. Having said that, it is less important for you to be held accountable when making feature requests than when you are submitting bug reports.

One Feature Request per Report

You should avoid the temptation to save yourself effort by combining different ideas into one massive report. If there are three related aspects to the same overriding problem, then file each of these aspects separately. Under no circumstances should you ever file a “big Feature Request list” report that reels off a laundry list of separate, unrelated ideas.