[rfc] Should we "block" bugreports for the latest stable releases of KDE apps?

[Krzysztof Lichota]

2008/4/25, Lubos Lunak <l.lunak at suse.cz>:
> On Friday 25 of April 2008, Krzysztof Lichota wrote:
>  > IMO bugs for older KDE version should be accepted, marked as
>  > "Untriaged for current version" or something similar, and then someone
>  > with latest KDE version can verify if this bug still happens.
>
>  That's a nice theory, but unfortunately it's probably just that. We already
>  can't keep up with the incoming bugreports. Even if we allowed stuff from
>  KDE3.5.5 or older (and that's a year and half old), the first reaction of
>  most developers is going to be 'Can you reproduce with the latest version?".
>  And the reporter says that they don't know, and the developer shelves the
>  bugreport for somewhen when they'll have time to check (=indefinitely).
>  Where's the gain in that?

Well, it depends if you want to have as little bug reports as
possible, or you want the bugs to be really fixed.

And please notice that the process I have described involves some
other people than developers - bug triagers. I think it is waste of
precious developers time if developers have to triage bugs. This can
be done by people who are not developers, it is enough if they are
"power users", who know a bit more about KDE. There should be team of
bug triagers for KDE who are the first line of bug reports - AFAIK it
is not the case now with KDE bug reporting scheme.

The bug reporting process IMO should be like that:
1. Bug reported -> untriaged state. Developers do not see these bugs.
2. Bug triager checks if this bug is duplicate, verifies the bug
existence in latest KDE and assigns it to proper KDE module (sometimes
reporters do not have enough knowledge to correctly assign bugs).
3. Now the developer should take a look at this bug, when it is really
a new, currently existing bug.

Regards

Krzysztof Lichota

PS. I have stopped submitting bugs for KDE a long time ago as I cannot
keep up with latest  KDE releases. And it is not like I have not
reported any bugs in the past, see:
http://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=&long_desc_type=allwordssubstr&long_desc=&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&bugidtype=include&bug_id=&votes=&emailassigned_to1=1&emailtype1=substring&email1=&emailreporter2=1&emailtype2=substring&email2=lichota&changedin=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=Now&chfieldvalue=&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&cmdtype=doit