[KDE/Mac] Bug reporting in KDE on Apple OS X

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys,

On 27/06/2014, at 5:24 PM, Marko Käning wrote:
> On 27 Jun 2014, at 05:03 , Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:
>> When a KDE app crashes, it is supposed to run Dr Konqi and there is
>> a button in Dr K to get a backtrace, if you are a developer.  There is also a
>> bug-reporting dialog in Dr Konqi that prompts an end-user for details of
>> how the crash occurred and automatically raises a report on bugs.kde.org,
>> appending the backtrace details.
> 
> Yes, the bug reporting dialog also crossed my ways…
> 
>> I got this entire sequence to work a few days ago.  See
>> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336075#c3 … :-) and I now
>> have to find out how to make it work every time.

My current patches for KCrash and Dr Konqi will let you get a backtrace and
will take you as far as logging into bugs.kde.org to report a bug, at that point
you need to have kded4 running in order to proceed further (see below).

There are two ways to report a bug from a KDE app, one if it crashes
and gets into Dr Konqi, the other if you select Help->Report Bug…
And they work completely differently.  And of course you can always
bring up bugs.kde.org in your browser and report a bug there.

At present, the Dr Konqi one depends on you having the KDE Daemon
(kded4) running in the background, which is unlikely to be happening
in a Mac OS X environment.  Oddly enough, kded4 is built as an app
in /Applications/MacPorts/KDE4 and you can set it running from there
if you need it.

The only thing kded4 does in Dr Konqi is to load kded4's KCookieJar
add-on and get a reply (via DBus) on whether you have cookies enabled
for the bugs.kde.org website.  See [2] for a layman's intro to kded4, but
don't take fright at the material about (historical) bugs in kded4 modules.

You can get past this point in Dr Konqi and report the bug, ONLY if kded4
is running AND you have cookies enabled for bugs-kde.org.  The subsequent
dialog is quite nice and does not involve any browsers.  It even has clickable
links in some of the dialog text that takes you straight into your Apple browser
of choice (i.e. Firefox in my case).  The links do such things as open a new
bugs.kde.org account if you need one.  I think Qt4-Mac is doing this, not KDE.

AFAICT the only point of the cookies-test is that when you are in bugs.kde.org
it can remember your login.  So I don't think it is reasonable to block reporting
the bug just because cookies are not enabled.  BTW, Dr Konqi seems to report
bugs OK if I comment out all the code to do with kded4 and KCookieJar.

>> Re for the Help-> Report Bug… menu item in every KDE app.  I got it to
>> work once, but in that case I do not really know why or what I did right… :-(
> 
> … which is why I can give you some support on that front. Check out posts
> around [1] for more info, where it turned out that the web browser
> configuration is actually responsible for this mess!

I had a look at all that, but got further confused.  The Help-> Report Bug… dialog
is quite different to the Dr Konqi one.  It relies on starting a browser (your default
browser, supposedly) and running some CGI on bugs.kde.org to let you create
a bug report via web forms.  Trouble is my default browser is Firefox and it is hard
to get that into KDE on Apple OS X.  It keeps asking what browser I want to use,
but only offers Konqueror as a choice.

None of that KDE config stuff seems to be aware of Apple-apps, as opposed to
Linux executables.  Kcmshell4 is built as an app in /Applications/MacPorts/KDE4,
but if you run it as an app it bombs out as if it is a command, because it lacks a
mandatory parameter.

And KDE's "what shall I run this with" dialog seems not to be aware of stuff in
the /Applications area, such as Firefox or Safari.

One time I did get KDE to accept the full path of the primary Firefox executable,
using kwriteconfig, but then Firefox bombed because KDE was trying to start a
second copy of it, rather than just adding a tab in which I could report a bug.  So
I shut the first Firefox down (I usually have it running all the time) and then I got
a bug report via Firefox to go (once).

I will write to kde-devel about some of the above.

Mainly I don't know whether we should have kded4 running all the time in Apple
OS X if we are using KDE apps, or whether there is some way around that.  What
do Windows and Gnome versions of KDE do?

And I don't know why we seem to have so many versions of "report a bug" in KDE, nor
why such an important function should have so many dependencies in some cases.

Cheers, Ian W.

P.S. I am learning quite a bit about the internals of KDE now … :-)

> [1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=139915316302201&w=2


[2] http://kdepepo.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/troubleshooting-kded4-bugs/