KDE SC 4.8.4 important problems

Sun Jun 10 02:23:04 BST 2012

Hello,

firstly, to be honest, let me say I'm doing huge effort to write this mail in a 
way that I don't look like a clueless cretin who reports bugs to the mailing 
lists instead of the proper place (bugs.kde.org) just to "cheat" and get "my" 
bugs fixed. I promise I'm not that kind of person, I have a git/svn KDE account 
and I'm already doing a very modest contribution. In my honest opinion I know 
a bit how things work in KDE with regarding to the bug reporting stuff.

Also I'm packaging KDE for Debian in a team collaborating with other people 
since some time ago (I've been involved in 4.5.x, 4.6.x, 4.7.x and 4.8.x) and 
that's why I am writing here: when testing the latest point release of KDE SC 
(4.8.4), we are getting several crashes, and most of them are the kind of bugs 
(called release-critical in Debian) which would prevent us to release packages 
in the next stable release or migrate them to the "testing" branch. 

Most of these crashes follow this pattern (sorry for the vagueness, I 
hope to gather more information this night or so, I'll try to keep you posted 
but I can't promise anything):
1. Can't be reproduced with Nepomuk disabled.
2. Can't be reproduced with kdelibs 4.8.3
3. Can't be reproduced with KDE SC 4.9.
4. Could also be reproduced by various users and developers from other 
distributions.
5. They are not 100% reproducible; however they happen everytime in some 
computers, on others just very often; so often that make certain KDE programs 
unusuable.
6. I _feel_ backtraces might be invalid.

Since I have been packaging KDE (more or less since 4.5 as said above) I never 
got 7 potential RC bugs in a release (not even a .0 one) after just ~2 days of 
use. Read again the characteristics 2. 3. and .4; that in conjunction with the 
fact that some people just discovered today how you are managing git 
branches/freeze for kdelibs (myself included) is why I think we are getting 
some people in other thread questioning -with or without reason- the kdelibs 
development model. I don't want to discuss the kdelibs development model in 
this thread (I would really prefer to keep any possible "omfg kdelibs 
developers are using the same branch for 4.9 and 4.8" messages in the other 
thread) I'm just explaining the situation, I hope you get now why you are 
reading the things you are reading in the other thread.

That being said, in this thread I want to focus on the actual grave problem(s) 
of 4.8.4, this is the list of crashes I have been experiencing:

#1 dolphin:
I can reproduce it right now in one of my computers just opening it, in other 
sometimes it crashes just clicking a file or folder. Eshat Cakar -a fellow 
Debian packager- also got other crash just clicking a folder, however he can't 
reproduce it anymore after he rebooted his computer.
Backtraces:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug_dolphin_santa.kcrash.
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug_dolphin_eshat.txt

#2 gwenview 
I can reproduce it just clicking an image and sometimes even just starting the 
application.
Backtrace:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug_gwenview_santa.kcrash

#3 kontact executing the kaddressbook component
I can reproduce it very oftenly just clicking the kaddressbok component in 
kontact.
Backtrace:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug_kontact_santa.kcrash

#4 kmail executed outside kontact
I can reproduce it just executing kmail outside kontact
Backtrace:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug_kmail_santa.kcrash

#5 kmail marking messages as read
I think this one got fixed by a commit in kdepimlibs, which I included in the 
debian packaging. Please ignore for now.

#6 kontact executing various components: calendar, to-do list, journal
When clicking on various kontact component I'm getting a segmentation fault, 
always with the same backtrace:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/bug2_kontact_santa.kcrash

#7 kmail links
I can reproduce this one just opening a message with an url. Just clicking 
that url, which would it open it in konqueror given my local configuration 
crashes kmail:
Backtrace:
http://alioth.debian.org/~santa-guest/4.8.4_crashes/kmail_links.kcrash
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