Reporting bugs and requesting features¶

Reporting bugs¶

Before reporting a bug on the ticket tracker consider these points:

• Check that someone hasn’t already filed the bug report by searching or running custom queries in the ticket tracker.

• Don’t use the ticket system to ask support questions. Use the Django Forum or the Django Discord server for that.

• Don’t reopen issues that have been marked “wontfix” without finding consensus to do so on the Django Forum.

• Don’t use the ticket tracker for lengthy discussions, because they’re likely to get lost. If a particular ticket is controversial, please move the discussion to the Django Forum.

Well-written bug reports are incredibly helpful. However, there’s a certain amount of overhead involved in working with any bug tracking system so your help in keeping our ticket tracker as useful as possible is appreciated. In particular:

• Do read the FAQ to see if your issue might be a well-known question.

• Do ask on Django Forum or the Django Discord server first if you’re not sure if what you’re seeing is a bug.

• Do write complete, reproducible, specific bug reports. You must include a clear, concise description of the problem, and a set of instructions for replicating it. Add as much debug information as you can: code snippets, test cases, exception backtraces, screenshots, etc. A nice small test case is the best way to report a bug, as it gives us a helpful way to confirm the bug quickly.

• Don’t post to Django Forum only to announce that you have filed a bug report. All the tickets are mailed to another list, django-updates, which is tracked by developers and interested community members; we see them as they are filed.

To understand the lifecycle of your ticket once you have created it, refer to Triage workflow.

Requesting features¶

We’re always trying to make Django better, and your feature requests are a key part of that. Here are some tips on how to make a request most effectively:

• Evaluate whether the feature idea requires changes in Django’s core. If your idea can be developed as an independent application or module — for instance, you want to support another database engine — we’ll probably suggest that you develop it independently. Then, if your project gathers sufficient community support, we may consider it for inclusion in Django.

• Propose the feature in the new feature ideas GitHub project (not in the ticket tracker) by creating a new item in the Idea column. This is where the community and the Steering Council evaluate new ideas for the Django ecosystem. This step is especially important for large or complex proposals. We prefer to discuss any significant changes to Django’s core before any development begins. In some cases, a feature may be better suited as a third-party package, where it can evolve independently of Django’s release cycle.

• Describe clearly and concisely what the missing feature is and how you’d like to see it implemented. Include example code (non-functional is OK) if possible.

• Explain why you’d like the feature. Explaining a minimal use case will help others understand where it fits in, and if there are already other ways of achieving the same thing.

See also: Documenting new features.

Requesting performance optimizations¶

Reports of a performance regression, or suggested performance optimizations, should provide benchmarks and commands for the ticket triager to reproduce.

See the django-asv benchmarks for more details of Django’s existing benchmarks.

How we make decisions¶

Whenever possible, we aim for rough consensus. Emoji reactions are used on issues within the new feature ideas GitHub project to track community feedback. The following meanings are assigned to each reaction:

• 👍: I support this feature and would use it

• 👎: I oppose this feature or believe it would cause issues for me or Django

• 😕: I have no strong opinion on this feature

• 🎉: This feature seems like a straightforward and beneficial addition

The Steering Council will regularly review the ideas in the project, moving those with community support through the following stages:

• Idea

• Approved - Idea refinement - Team creation

• In progress

• Working solution - Review - Feedback

• Needs maintainer (Django only)

• Done

Occasionally, discussions on feature ideas or the direction of Django may take place on the Django Forum. These discussions may include informal votes, which follow the voting style invented by Apache and used on Python itself, where votes are given as +1, +0, -0, or -1. Roughly translated, these votes mean:

• +1: “I love the idea and I’m strongly committed to it.”

• +0: “Sounds OK to me.”

• -0: “I’m not thrilled, but I won’t stand in the way.”

• -1: “I strongly disagree and would be very unhappy to see the idea turn into reality.”

Although these votes are informal, they’ll be taken very seriously. After a suitable voting period, if an obvious consensus arises we’ll follow the votes.