Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!”
Home Assistant is now almost around for 7 years! During that time, it has grown
into a big project, beloved by many of you. However, as the project grew, some
things might not have turned out the way it should be, are missing or maybe even
started annoying you. That is what this month is about.
We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub might be a steep hill.
You’ll need a GitHub account, report an issue following the issue templates
using Markdown and the report itself needs to be written in a way a developer
can work with it. Furthermore, we use our issue tracker for tracking actual
issues and bugs; not small feature requests or annoyances.
While this is a common and reasonable process to collect, track and process
bugs, our issue tracking process might not be the ideal way to learn about
annoyances or small tweaks and improvements that can make us all enjoy
Home Assistant even more.
In May, of this year, the Ruby on Rails project had a similar month,
which we have enjoyed watching. Now, we are going to do something similar.
Today, we have opened up a Community Forum category as a safe, lower
barrier place to tell about your Home Assistant “What the heck?!” moments,
and more importantly, discuss and vote on topics your fellow users have
brought up.
Frenck recently tried something similar for Home Assistant on Twitter,
by asking:
Enlighten me 💡
The whole community would celebrate and be shedding happy tears of joy, if this tiny little thing was added to @home_assistant…
— Franck Nijhof (@Frenck) July 21, 2020
The responses to that question were amazing! Full of inspiration, recognition of
stuff that annoyed us as well, but also some really really good suggestions.
And this is not just about new tiny little things, examples may include:
- I’d love to see some Home Assistant sensors with things like: The total
automations, triggers processed this hour, the total number of integrations,
entities, number of events fired. - I want to be able to upload a backup on the frontend on the first install.
- Maybe you are annoyed by some logs that you need to refresh and scroll to see
updates? - You have a lot of template entities that all do the same thing and maybe could
be handled by Home Assistant automatically. - Always need a workaround to automate something the way you like and really
wished Home Assistant provided a better trigger/condition for it?
These are the things we are looking for, the things we should share this month.
We are really looking forward to all the stuff that will be brought up!
This will be interesting!
So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?
FAQ
-
“I have multiple things! Should I put all my stuff in a single topic?!”
No, please create multiple, smaller topics. Each topic can be voted on,
picked up and resolved. Having multiple things stacked in a single forum
topic, makes resolving, discussing and voting on them hard. There is no
limitation on how many things one can suggest this month. -
“Is everything reported going to be fixed/addressed?”
There is no guarantee that will happen. The goal is to lower the barrier to
reporting things for one month. Home Assistant still relies on contributors
to address or improve the project. However, we do think collecting feedback
this way can tremendously help with the upcoming
Hacktoberfest. -
“I really want this new integration to be implemented, so I can use my
devices. Is this the right place for it?”No, this event is not for requesting new device or services integrations.
Please use the “Feature Requests” forum category instead. -
“I’ve found a bug and am comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report my
issue now?”If you are comfortable with using GitHub, please, by all means, file an issue
report on GitHub.
