Qt Commercial Support Weekly #1: How to Report Your Bugs

This is the first installment of "Qt Commercial Support Weekly" a weekly (surprise!) blog post by Andy Shaw (Head of Support) on interesting info on bugs, contributions, tips and tricks and everything else in the wonderful world of Qt Commercial Support. Stay tuned!

Authored by: Andy Shaw, Qt Commercial Support

Last week was a busy week for the Qt Commercial support team, some of us (myself included) were in Munich for Qt Developer Days 2011 answering your questions directly.  It was great to be able to speak to some of our customers directly about what they are doing in Qt and helping them out at the same time. I hope that those who wanted to get support from us there were able to do so!

One thing that seemed to become apparant while I was there is that it is not clear as to what happens to bugs that are being reported from customers as there are two ways to do this.  There is the Qt Commercial Customer Portal - http://qt.digia.com/customerportal and the public Qt bugreports bug tracker - http://bugreports.qt.nokia.com.

What is the difference between the two?
When you report your bug via the Qt Commercial Customer Portal everything goes via the Qt Commercial Support team first, so it can be used for not just support requests, but also for reporting the bugs that you are having a problem with in Qt too.  The benefit of reporting them via the customer portal as opposed to using the bugreports bug tracker is that we at Qt Commercial can see what problems are arising for you and it also gives us a chance to try and find a solution straight away in the form of a workaround or a patch that you can apply to Qt.  Whereas, if you report directly to the bugreports bug tracker, then we are not able to tell that a customer has reported directly there, and as a result you will not necessarily get an answer at all or any indication that the bug is being worked on.

What happens to the bug in the Qt Commercial Customer Portal?
What happens with a bug report that gets reported to Qt Commercial via the customer portal is that after the support team has a look and have hopefully found a solution in some form for you, the bug will be reported to the public Qt bugreports bug tracker so it can be seen by both Qt Commercial developers and the community (rest assured any confidential information is not made available and permission is obtained first if the source code used is not straightforward).  The Qt Commercial developers can also see very quickly that it has been reported via a customer because it has been reported by one of the Qt Commercial Support team members, and therefore they can prioritize it above the other reported bugs as they know it is a problem for a customer.

So, in short, as a Qt Commercial customer, if you have any support requests or bug reports then send them via the Qt Commercial Customer Portal (http://qt.digia.com/customerportal) and we will take care of everything else for you :-)