drkonqi and outdated software

[Aurélien COUDERC]

Le 19 novembre 2025 09:46:58 GMT+01:00, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> a écrit :
>On Wed, Nov 19, 2025 at 3:40 AM Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hey!
>>
>> I currently have an MR open to disable crash reporting to KDE by
>> default and would like your input on the matter.
>>
>> https://invent.kde.org/plasma/drkonqi/-/merge_requests/364
>>
>> Essentially we have a problem with users sitting on outdated software
>> versions, reporting crashes, and then getting their crash closed
>> because their version is no longer getting releases from us. So the
>> idea is we have a simple knob to turn on/off reporting to KDE at
>> compile time and leave it to distributions to toggle this as
>> necessary.
>>
>> When this is disabled, instead of getting the regular drkonqi UX flow,
>> the user will get a less integrated flow where they get a notification
>> about the crash that takes them to coredump-gui and then from there
>> they can click a button to go to the bug report url you have defined
>> in os-release.
>>
>> How the knob is used is mostly up to you. You could have it enabled
>> while you ship supported versions but disable it when their support
>> ends. Or just leave it disabled and route all crash reporting through
>> your bug tracker first, upstreaming as necessary.
>>
>> Obviously if you release supported versions regularly through rolling
>> updates or backports you can always enable reporting to KDE.
>>
>> There is also the matter of default-off or on. Any preferences?
>>
>
>I think it should remain default-on, with recommendations that
>distributions that freeze Plasma versions switch it off. Linux
>distributions that do not keep KDE Plasma relatively up to date can
>then make the choice to switch it off.
>
>The majority of distributions that ship KDE Plasma do ship the latest
>versions as they can, and we should optimize for that.

Yes I agree with that. Even in Debian we do track the latest versions of KDE software in unstable/testing during our development cycles. So we would just disable the flag when we freeze the versions for the next stable release.


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien