Login for bug reporting

[Jekyll Wu]

On 2013年02月07日 01:56, Kevin Krammer wrote:
Hi

> at FOSDEM I was approached by a person who asked me to relay his
> dissatisfaction with the requirement of having a KDE Bugzilla account to
> report crashes via the KDE crash handler dialog.
>
> The issue in his case was kind of made worse by having this obstacle appear
> too late, i.e. after he had followed the instructions to create a useful
> backtrace and had downloaded several tens of megabytes of debug symbols.

Well, there is good reason to not put the account creating/logining 
operation at the beginning :

Not every crash is worth reporting. DrKonqi already does some basic 
checking before allowing users to report a crash.  If the account 
creating/logining operation is put at the very beginning, then users 
might be told they should not report this crash AFTER they have spent 
time in creating the account or logining. I think that would be more 
annoying than the complaint raised in this thread. They may get the 
impression of being cheated to waste their time, especially creating one 
account for nothing.


> Being a FOSS developer himself he said that he understands the need for having
> a communication channel with the reported, but just having an email address
> for that would be sufficient (e.g. Debian's bug tracker works that way).


> So the question is whether alternative login options [1] are something we
> could do or whether this is impossible in our setup or just something we don't
> want to do because of certain drawbacks.


As for the questions of supporting alternative authentication, anonymous 
bug database , etc, I lack the related knowledge to make them happen so 
I wouldn't make stupid comments.

But there is one thing I would like to raise :

    bugs.kde.org is already receiving TOO MANY crash reports, especially 
useless reports from outdated versions.

    We don't lack (useful) crash reports. We lack people/time/method to 
deal with them.


So as long as we still use bugs.kde.org for crash reporting, I'm against 
any change that makes more (useless) crash reports flooding in. I would 
rather spend time in the opposite direction. One thing that immediately 
comes into my mind is preventing crash reports from outdated versions 
(anything older than 4.9.x at the moment) .  That is actually already 
possible after https://reviewboard.kde.org/r/108512 , and I will try my 
best to make it happen in 4.11.

Regards
Jekyll