Bug reporting for KDE 4

[Andreas Hartmetz]

Hi all,

I've just had this idea ("Oh noes!" I hear you scream)...
We have *lots* of bugs in KDE 4 and we all hit them all the time, right?
There is also quite some confusion about where/if/how to report them
Bugzilla? Heavyweight, slow, I fscking hate bugzilla (MHO) and avoid it.
Mailing lists? Pushes down SNR on development lists.
A wiki? Not really suited to very unstructured information and 
conversation-style exchange. It can be done but (again IMHO) it doesn't feel 
right.

What about a special mailing list just for bugs in KDE 4, large and small?
kde4-bugs, kde4-crunch, whatever. The biggest advantage over the regular 
mailing lists would be that it's explicitly encouraged to report 
*everything*, however small. Additionally, people generally don't watch or 
participate in all mailing list and one usually tests more things than the 
ones covered by one's list memberships.

Use case: Random dev starts KDE 4, uses Dolphin and discovers that opening a 
context menu and right-clicking on another item only closes the current menu 
but doesn't open a new one. That is one small annoyance so random dev 
considers this to be nothing to make noise about. Laziness also helps to 
avoid telling others about it.
kde4-bugs to the rescue! Random dev has KMail open anyway and writes a 
three-liner "Subject: Dolphin part, context menu glitch" to kde4-bugs. Maybe 
it gets ignored, maybe it reminds the developers to do something about it. In 
the worst case it serves as a TODO item with no schedule to fix it.
In any case we might finally get semi exhaustive list of bugs at all. Numbers. 
Numbers are always good for estimates like, say, release dates.
It's probably the solution that needs the least amount of work from everyone 
involved, mainly due to all the cool things that mail clients can do. Threads 
and search mostly.

Right now we don't have a coherent approach to deal with beta, i.e. mostly 
easy to fix, bugs.

RFC!

(It should be obvious that I'm not picking on Dolphin's maintainers, their 
stuff is above average in maturity)

Cheers,
Andreas