Filing Bugs in Kubuntu

[Yuriy Kozlov]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 10:14 PM, Richard JOHNSON <nixternal at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I was working on some documentation this evening and I figured I would go
> through and document filing bugs in Kubuntu. I went for the old way which
> is now using DrKonqi instead of Apport. I remember people talking in the
> past about filing bugs in Kubuntu at bugs.kde.org instead of Launchpad
> because we don't have enough people to triage, and that we would utilize
> KDE instead.
>
> I went through meeting minutes and couldn't find anything to support that
> decision, so I went to the mailing list and there was nothing there, and
> then I went to the wiki and found our bug reporting procedure [1] which
> specifies reporting bugs the old way.
>
> I am sorry if I missed the discussion, but I am not going to sit here and
> grep 5 years of IRC logs to try and piece it together. Was this a decision
> that everyone voted on? If so, what was the reasoning behind this? I ask
> that if you do provide reasoning that you do not state either of the
> following:
>
>  * Apport sucks, DrKonqi is better
>
> or
>
>  * Kubuntu is to small to triage
>
> Apport sucks, DrKonqi is better is not a valid excuse. We should be filing
> reports in Launchpad, everyone should be. When someone follows the
> recommended and documented way of utilizing the Report a bug feature in the
> Help Menu, it is going to KDE. How are we tracking these bugs? How are they
> being triaged?
>
> Kubuntu is to small to triage is another very bad excuse. KDE may be
> larger, but it isn't large enough to throw resources at bugs which may very
> well be valid. Only a few projects in KDE are triaging bugs rather quickly,
> while there are still bugs filed from Kubuntu 3 and 4 years ago that
> haven't been touched, even though the software has been updated many times
> since the reports.
>
> As you can probably tell, unless there is an amazing excuse to do it this
> way, I find it bad practice. You can search through b.k.o and find a lot of
> bugs that were Kubuntu related, or only valid in Kubuntu, that were marked
> as invalid. If the reporter was lucky, someone may have said "File this in
> Launchpad." I am fairly certain there are apps most of us don't use that
> others are, and they are filing bugs upstream and we have no clue about
> them.
>
> If it is in deed the case, that bugs should be filed upstream and not LP,
> is there an agreement at all with upstream on this? Is it in a policy
> anywhere or documented anywhere? My guess is no to both of those.
>
> [1] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Bugs/Reporting
>
> --
>  Name|  Richard JOHNSON

Here are some reasons to use one vs. the other:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Bugs/Apport/Discussion
I was hoping this would be discussed at UDS, but I don't know to what
extent that happened.  However, a new policy was put in place:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Specs/LucidBugTriagePolicy
This really took effect before UDS, so I don't know if there is some
log where it was decided.

I agree with you on most points, and if nothing else, this degrades
the user experience by having two different ways and UIs to report
problems that people have to learn about.  However, from a practical
standpoint, sorting through all the upstream reports in Launchpad had
long ago become infeasible, and as Harald explains, having the bugs
piling up there was doing more harm than good.  I get the impression
that there has been some benefit from the cleanup (done almost
entirely by Jonathan Thomas) and Launchpad has actually become useful
as a Kubuntu bug tracker, but I haven't actually been keeping track
and I would like to hear some evidence of this -- maybe a sort of
progress report on the Spec.

The Bugs/Reporting page was written before the change in policy.  One
of the effects of the change is that the page needs to be updated but
we still need to keep instructions up for Karmic until its EOL.  The
new instructions should be about the same as they would have been for
Jaunty, so the older releases shouldn't be an issue.

Note that the ubuntu-bug command is still available and Apport may
still be used for non-KDE applications, so the instructions need to
explain that, and apport-kde needs to be maintained (to my knowledge
it is still fairly broken in Karmic, and I'd like to see the UI more
KDE-like, maybe similar to Dr. Konqi.)

~ Yuriy