revisiting submitting bugs to kde.org

[Jonathan Thomas]

On Mon 01 Feb 2010 09:51:06 pm Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> Recently my buddy Richard posted a question about the policy 
to submit bugs
> directly to bugs.kde.org and I would like to reopen this 
discussion as not
> the best policy to continue to have.
> 
> First off let me lay the groundwork that I understand that 
running either
> RC or Beta versions of KDE can lead to bugs
> 
> So now that is out of the way let me lay some examples as to 
why this is
> not the best idea:
> 
> 1.  Crashes in krunner:  I get a lot of crashes w/ krunner 
and recently
> reported the bug to b.k.o and almost got an immediate 
response saying it
> was a known issue and I needed to upgrade my version of QT to 
4.6.1.  My
> first question is:  How do I do that to not have this bug?  
Second
> question is "Why did I bother the KDE guys with a known bug?"  
Perhaps not
> having the latest version of QT is a Kubuntu bug instead and 
should have
> gone to launchpad for correct triaging?

I don't quite understand your first question... I think you 
worded it improperly...

Anyways, this case is a bit unique in that we cannot upgrade to 
Qt 4.6.1 until the Phonon mess is sorted out.

> 
> 2.  Duplicate bugs:  I get a lot of crashes for plasama-
desktop (on my
> laptop) and plasma-desktop (for my netbook) but all of the 
bugs I report to
> b.k.o are marked as duplicates. Don't know exactly if this is 
a problem
> with my searching using Dr. Konqi and the bug reporting tool 
or these bugs
> should also be on LP?

Duplicate bugs (especially of widespread crashes) are to be 
expected with the territory, and reporting bugs to Launchpad 
wouldn't really fix this. It would just make the dupes go 
somewhere else.

> 
> 3.  Not having a valid bug report:  I think this might be a 
bigger reason
> then #2.  When a bug report is not deemed as a good/valid bug 
report there
> is nothing else really to do.  Do I have the debug packages 
installed?  Do
> i even know what the debug package is to install?  For some 
reason I've
> had very little issues w/ apport giving me this type of 
information. So
> what do I do?  I stop reporting the bugs cause I don't know 
how to
> generate the bug report.  I've found that if apport does not 
generate a
> good enough bug, the bug triagers on LP remind me gentely via 
the "Needs
> Information" status to help me provide better information.  
If we continue
> to report our bugs to b.k.o instead of LP, perhaps this tool 
could be
> modified to suggest the correct debug packages to install?

From my experiences, the KDE bug guys are just as helpful as 
the LP guys when telling you how to get a good backtrace. They 
point people to a nice page[1] with instructions, or just tell 
you which debug packages to install.

There's also plenty of information on the Kubuntu wiki[2][3]


> 
> Anyways just some frustrations/thoughts after spending a lot 
of time
> 
> Thanks for listening to my thoughts


[1] 
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Debugging/How_to_create_useful_crash_reports
[2] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Bugs/Reporting
[3] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/DebuggingKDE