Please, please, report the problems you are having

Please, if you notice something not working,* the ONLY way to get it fixed*
is if you document the problem by opening an issue
http://code.google.com/p/opendatakit/issues/list and providing information:

  • what Android OS version(s) does it occur on (or Google/MySQL/PostgreSQL
    Aggregate deployment)
  • what device model
  • what version of ODK tool(s)
  • attach a form that reproduces the issue (ideally, a very small form)
  • the steps needed to reliably reproduce the issue.

If you silently work around the issue and never let us know of the
problem, then
it will never get fixed.

When preparing releases, I scan through these reported issues and try to
fix as many as I can. And, as always, we accept patches and bug fixes from
other groups that are contributed under Apache 2 license.

ยทยทยท ------------------- *FYI: The Google-Play-based crash reporting mechanism is the only mechanism that automatically reports software failures back to us.*

Most groups do not use Google Play when they install ODK Collect (for many
good reasons), which means that we have NO visibility into what problems
are occurring in your deployments!!! *You *need to be the reporting
mechanism.

We are just reaching a threshold of actively used Google-Play-installed ODK
Collect apps (about 45,000) that I have been able to identify and resolve
the first issue that has never been reported on the opendatakit@ list:

  • a bad french language string (improper translation) causes devices to
    crash during form submissions (when they fail).

If you have been working in french, and have silently suffered with this
issue, you might have suffered less if you had reported it. Fortunately, I
have enough failure reports from Google Play that I have identified and
fixed the issue, but it would have been nicer to have found out about the
issue from our list.

--
Mitch Sundt
Software Engineer
University of Washington
mitchellsundt@gmail.com