[Konversation-devel] [konversation] [Bug 329793] Krash!

[Eike Hein]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329793

--- Comment #17 from Eike Hein <hein at kde.org> ---
> So then you're NOT interested in bug reports from users.

On the contrary, I'm very interested in bug reports from users. But bug reports
are contributions to a participative development process, not a customer
service inquiry. You're informing us you've noticed what may be a bug; we're
going to use this information as we see fit to make our software better.


> While "resolved" may satisfy your needs, there's no reason an additional flag couldn't be added. Something like "Dependency Broken" perhaps.

That's exactly what "RESOLVED UPSTREAM" means. As a developer I agree that
Bugzilla could be improved for our needs, by the way, and by extension the
needs of our users, but this ticket isn't the place to discuss Bugzilla
improvements.


> You are strongly implying I should have the same skills & knowledge as a developer of your product, if I want to use your product. 

No, I think you misread that. I don't think you should need to have the same
skills and knowledge as I do (in fact Konversation stands to benefit more if
you bring different skills and knowledge to the table). I do expect you to be
aware of the mode in which Konversation is developed (by volunteers,
non-commercially, in the open) and have more than your own needs on your
agenda, e.g. the need for us to triage reports and decide where to spend finite
resources to help the most users. If you can't do that, I recommend switching
to a product that offers a different kind of relation with you indeed.

I've spent 8 years and hundreds of hours on improvements to Konversation, most
of them due to suggestions or inquiries by users. Some of my fellow developers
have been around even longer. I have a very clean conscience about my
contributions to the bottom line here.


> The average user doesn't care who is responsible, s/he simply wants to have a working system. 

That might accurately reflect the status-quo, but isn't a desirable state of
things, partly because it's not sustainable. We don't have the resources to
hide the complexity of the development process from users or succeed without
your help. If we did, we'd also fail to recruit new developers to replace those
who move on. We also feel that doing so does users a disservice in the long
run, since you don't have the full picture to make useful decisions.


> The user cannot be expected to understand the details of the relationship between subsystems, and so it falls to the developer to notify and interact with the system vendor, else it is likely that the problem will not get fixed.

This is true, and you'll be relieved to hear that this communication happens
all the time. The Konversation team (as well as many other people in KDE)
maintain strong relations with many distros, and many bugfixes that distros end
up pushing to users also in lower-level components are the result of us asking
them to ship them. We talk literally every day, and improving this
communication (e.g. by linking bug trackers to maintain upstream/downstream
references for the same problem) is an active topic of conversation.

However, in this case it's not reasonable from a resource POV to do this until
the bug has been confirmed to exist with a more recent version of Qt. The vast
majority of our users use a newer Qt and we're not seeing the same crash report
from them. Nothing in this report allows me to reproduce the crash with the
software I have. I could spend hours setting up a system with Qt 4.8.2 and try
to reproduce it there only to find out that it's been fixed in Qt 4.8.3, or I
can't reproduce it at all and we're none the wiser.

These are the kinds of decisions I need to make all the time when deciding
where to spend a finite amount of time to address the needs and concerns of
many users. I'm not saying you should have been born with an awareness of that,
I'm just trying to explain the background to the reaction you felt was
offensive to you, and hope you can understand it better.


> "Whatever you do, avoid Konversation because it keeps crashing and the developer doesn't care."

I know this to be false; I care greatly.


> I would hope that's not the result you want to see

You might also be interested to learn that guilting people and blackmailing
them with threats tends to have the opposite effect of what you think it has,
especially with volunteer-driven development. Instead of being spurned by their
honor to help you, people instead become depressed and burn out. In fact,
protecting fellow developers from people who maintain their human relationships
in this fashion is a particular concern of mine.

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