Should we make it easier and encourage bug reports to be send to distributions

[Christophe Giboudeaux]

Hi,

On jeudi 4 février 2016 21:38:49 CET Andre Heinecke wrote:
> 
> This is because KXmlGui encourages users to report bugs to bugs.kde.org
> itself. Shouldn't this be configurable and shouldn't we encourage
> distributions to do some bug triage themself, e.g. link users to their
> tracker first? I think we should. Afaik debian has the policy that you
> should report bugs to debian and the debian maintainer can triage the bug
> and say "this is upstream" with a (probably more qualified) upstream
> report. The bug is then fixed when a package with the fix is available in
> debian. Great! (This is not idealistic, I see this working with e.g. GnuPG)
> 
> I think this would help because:
> - Developers would get more qualified bug reports
> - Users would get responses from their Distributions, also telling them
> after a fix when this will affect them, which is probably more interesting
> then "fixed in master".
> - bugs.kde.org gets a bit more manageable (hopefully at least for first time
> reports)
> 
> And while this is work for distribution maintainers I think they have this
> work anyway. In the Status Quo report bugs upstream and others with their
> distribution and a package maintainer has to have a view on open bugs
> anyway.
> 
> I expect most package maintainers would be more comfortable in tracking bugs
> affecting their distribution then generally monitoring _all_ bugs of the
> module they are packaging through bugs.kde.org where there might be bugs
> that only affect development versions they are not packaging.
> 
> This should also help Packagers to see issues. There was just a report in
> the kdepim IRC channel (which triggered this mail) from a user that "Search
> does not work" because he did not have the akonadi_indexing_agent
> installed. While it is an issue for KDEPIM (and the kde bugtracker) that
> this case should be handled more gracefully by informing the user about
> that fact. Until this is the case a distribution should require the
> installation of said agent or face Bug reports about "Search not working".
> 

With my openSUSE hat on, my answer is "No thanks".

0/ You seem to believe a large part of issues seen by our users come from our 
packages. That's obviously wrong :)

1/ We're already getting lots of bug reports. Right now, we have 278 bug 
reports opened. Most of those are upstream issues (and a large part are plasma 
ones)

2/ We simply don't have the manpower to triage our bugs then find the original 
bug report on b.k.o.

3/ We were also dealing with users unhappy with the memory and disk usage 
caused by the indexing agent (based on Nepomuk then Baloo. We just replaced 
kdepim4 with kdepim5 recently and don't have feedback yet).

4/ We could however mark some bugs.kde.org reports as release blockers and 
stop packaging the tarball. This should "help developers to see issues".

Christophe


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/attachments/20160205/88698312/attachment.sig>