[Digikam-users] Auto rotate causes confusion - Is this by design?

[Hubert Furey]

I've been tracking a weird rotation problem for a while.  I would quite often
 locate an image that was taken rotated and displays in Digikam rotated, as
 expected.Then I would select the image to rotate 90 (left or right, didn't
 matter) and the image would rotate 180 deg....Then I would have to rotate
 90 deg back the other way before it was corrected.
I was never able to find anything on this issue on the internet and assumed
 when I upgraded to latest versions problem would be resolved.  

Well I am using latest from Ubuntu 8.10 repositories and problem still
 persisted.

Then I discovered that if I drag and drop a sample problem file to desktop
 that the image would be  rotated correctly.  
Hunting more inside digikam I found this option was disabled " Show
 images /thumbs rotated according to orientation tag".  I enabled this option
 and refreshed my folder and problem is corrected!

First question : Shouldn't this option be on by default?

Second question : I am very confused over the behavior of the rotation.  It
 visually appeared that I needed a 90 deg rotation but ended up flipping 180
 deg , which required a 90 deg rotate back to correct....Should this be
 considered a bug?

I am concerned that new users to Digikam would be very confused over
 this behavior.

Thanks for advice, I am not sure where to begin tracking this issue down....
Hubert