[Bug 1269199]

[Eike Hein]

> So then you're NOT interested in bug reports from users.

On the contrary, I'm very interested in bug reports from users. But bug
reports are contributions to a participative development process, not a
customer service inquiry. You're informing us you've noticed what may be
a bug; we're going to use this information as we see fit to make our
software better.


> While "resolved" may satisfy your needs, there's no reason an additional flag couldn't be added. Something like "Dependency Broken" perhaps.

That's exactly what "RESOLVED UPSTREAM" means. As a developer I agree
that Bugzilla could be improved for our needs, by the way, and by
extension the needs of our users, but this ticket isn't the place to
discuss Bugzilla improvements.


> You are strongly implying I should have the same skills & knowledge as a developer of your product, if I want to use your product. 

No, I think you misread that. I don't think you should need to have the
same skills and knowledge as I do (in fact Konversation stands to
benefit more if you bring different skills and knowledge to the table).
I do expect you to be aware of the mode in which Konversation is
developed (by volunteers, non-commercially, in the open) and have more
than your own needs on your agenda, e.g. the need for us to triage
reports and decide where to spend finite resources to help the most
users. If you can't do that, I recommend switching to a product that
offers a different kind of relation with you indeed.

I've spent 8 years and hundreds of hours on improvements to
Konversation, most of them due to suggestions or inquiries by users.
Some of my fellow developers have been around even longer. I have a very
clean conscience about my contributions to the bottom line here.


> The average user doesn't care who is responsible, s/he simply wants to have a working system. 

That might accurately reflect the status-quo, but isn't a desirable
state of things, partly because it's not sustainable. We don't have the
resources to hide the complexity of the development process from users
or succeed without your help. If we did, we'd also fail to recruit new
developers to replace those who move on. We also feel that doing so does
users a disservice in the long run, since you don't have the full
picture to make useful decisions.


> The user cannot be expected to understand the details of the relationship between subsystems, and so it falls to the developer to notify and interact with the system vendor, else it is likely that the problem will not get fixed.

This is true, and you'll be relieved to hear that this communication
happens all the time. The Konversation team (as well as many other
people in KDE) maintain strong relations with many distros, and many
bugfixes that distros end up pushing to users also in lower-level
components are the result of us asking them to ship them. We talk
literally every day, and improving this communication (e.g. by linking
bug trackers to maintain upstream/downstream references for the same
problem) is an active topic of conversation.

However, in this case it's not reasonable from a resource POV to do this
until the bug has been confirmed to exist with a more recent version of
Qt. The vast majority of our users use a newer Qt and we're not seeing
the same crash report from them. Nothing in this report allows me to
reproduce the crash with the software I have. I could spend hours
setting up a system with Qt 4.8.2 and try to reproduce it there only to
find out that it's been fixed in Qt 4.8.3, or I can't reproduce it at
all and we're none the wiser.

These are the kinds of decisions I need to make all the time when
deciding where to spend a finite amount of time to address the needs and
concerns of many users. I'm not saying you should have been born with an
awareness of that, I'm just trying to explain the background to the
reaction you felt was offensive to you, and hope you can understand it
better.


> "Whatever you do, avoid Konversation because it keeps crashing and the developer doesn't care."

I know this to be false; I care greatly.


> I would hope that's not the result you want to see

You might also be interested to learn that guilting people and
blackmailing them with threats tends to have the opposite effect of what
you think it has, especially with volunteer-driven development. Instead
of being spurned by their honor to help you, people instead become
depressed and burn out. In fact, protecting fellow developers from
people who maintain their human relationships in this fashion is a
particular concern of mine.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1269199

Title:
  Qt library crashes

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