[Digikam-devel] Proposal to automatically handle crash reports from obsolete versions

[Mark Purcell]

All,

I know everyone is annoyed with the beta5/ ubuntu issue, and how much of 
Gilles time it is consuming.. I don't want to reopen the issue with ubuntu, 
but want to explore how we can prevent such issues from consuming so much KDE 
developer time.

I have posted the following comment to the recent post on the Planet about KDE 
Bug reporting..


http://darioandreskde.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/hello-planetkde/#comment-17


Darío,

One comment about the crash reporting tool and a real world example.

A VERY useful feature in the crash reporting tool would be to check the 
current released version of a component and warn the reporter if they are not 
using the currently released version.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210462 is currently sitting as the sixth 
most often reported bug.

Without getting into the issues behind the report, Ubuntu released digikam 
beta5 as a component of their karmic release.  Unfortunately beta5 had a nasty 
habit of crashing, which was quickly fixed in beta6, with subsequent rc and 
1.0.0 final releases.

Anyway back to the Ubuntu users, and there are a lot of them, and this 
component doesn't get updated until lucid in April, again lets not go down 
that hole about release cycles.

So current Ubuntu users get this crash from using beta5, they get presented 
the crash reporting tool and follow through we end up with a trivial bug as 
the six most reported, and our lead developer is doing the bulk of the triage 
himself.  Not good use of limited KDE resources..

My wish for the bug reporting wizard, is that the user on beta5 gets the 
crash, the bug wizard says hey I see you are using beta5, are you aware that 
1.0.0 final has been released and probably fixes your issue, you are 
recommended to upgrade to the current release before submitting your crash  
report.

This way the increases the use of current released components and it decreases 
the case of users submitting reports against obsolete versions.

Mark
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