On today’s TrueNAS Tech Talk, Kris digs into a major feature in the upcoming TrueNAS 26.04 “Halfmoon” release - Spotlight search support for MacOS. Find out how the new “truesearch” service will work to index and catalog your files to give lightning-fast search results, in a common back-end DB, so that additional search protocols can extend the functionality in the future. Chris and Kris will also tackle a pack of viewer questions - and probably sign themselves up for a bunch more Feature Requests as a result!
The link is to a Feature Request which is one year old, has (holds!) 43 votes, but has yet to be processed.
There must be a set time line for requests to be reviewed, be that “x months from original post” or “general review every x months”, and then requests are accepted or declined. No, or not much, explantion needed.
But release the votes!
If the outcome has to be “still need thinking about”, release votes anyway, or allocate more votes. The current situation just results in paralysis: Requests pile up, and those interested are out of votes anyway so no input is given. (This other link has 100 votes and is 10 months old. No decision.)
Maybe offtopic but recently I was thoroughly searching the internet for the ultimate Windows search tool and maybe this will help some people struggling with the same problem.
First I would like to give honorary mention to Everything which is great for free tool but its mainly good for filenames and metadata.
The true ultimate tool is FileLocator Pro. Its got free Lite version but the Pro version can do basically everything and I couldnt find any other tool that could do as much.
It can of course search filenames and metadata, but also any content on PC. It can search in emails for both Outlook and Thunderbird for attachments and their content. If PDF contains text thats easy, but it can even do OCR and search in imaged based PDF (for example scanned documents). It offers preview in form of text and as pdf viewer. And you can create index so searching is blazing fast. Only creating that index takes long.
Well, the search indexing reminded me of this because I spent a long time searching for the best tool.
This is the kind of constructive criticism and feedback I can make take back to the engineering team to make actionable.
Kris and I have tried to explain a bit about the decision process and how it’s way more complex than it looks on the surface to implement, test, merge something - and while it’s certainly possible to put an “accepted” or “rejected” on a request in a given time frame, it risks just punting the issue and having the same problem of “it was accepted N months ago, why isn’t it in the product now?” if the feature turns out to be more nuanced than it looks.
It’s not to say we can’t or won’t improve the process (especially around the communication) but to dismiss the entirety of feature requests as a joke is a bit much, IMO.
But it should not be too much to ask some kind of reaction to feature requests with dozens of votes. A little “hey thanks for the request we’re looking into it” would go a long way to show that it’s not getting ignored…
I don’t think they rise even to that level–the situation certainly isn’t funny.
If you want the community to take them seriously, then you need to take them seriously, and be seen to be taking them seriously. That means you engage with them, particularly when they’ve gotten dozens of votes. You may recall that, when feature requests were done on Jira, ten votes were the threshold for you all to do something, even if that “something” was “mark it as accepted, and then still let it languish for years” (see, e.g., the file manager that was requested 8+ years ago). At least you acknowledged it.
So now feature requests are on the forum–as they’d been in the past. Probably a good thing, generally speaking, for the sake of everyone’s visibility. But now it’s front and center that you can’t be bothered to address most of them. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s concluded from that that you just don’t care about them.
Don’t tell me much you care, and how much you value community input–I don’t want to hear it. Act on them. Hell, even engaging with them would be a good start.
I’m putting my name out there (similar to the “I’ll fork it myself” comment) - I’m going to personally take ownership of the communication chain here. I’ll start combing through the FR’s, and while I’m not making the call of what makes the cut and when, I can certainly offer some insight and my own takes on the likely outcomes should I bring a given feature up.
Indeed, managing users’ expertectations will be another issue, but this stage would already be a huge improvement over “this has been open for 10 months and no word about it” or, even worse, “hmm, interesting but I’m out of votes”. I cannot understate how much damage the latter does…
Since TrueNAS is a on a 6 month schedule, maybe the team could have a meeting twice a year, at an appropriate moment to define the features which could go on the next or the next next release, and review pending requests.
Again, the review process can be short. But “sorry, can’t/won’t do it” is better than “left open indefinitely”.
That’s actually what happens now - features are scoped out for the following major release and ideally locked in (so that no one scope-creeps new things in and sidetracks prior work) so like I said it’s been the responses that have been lacking.
