An interesting read when discussing what to do about our bugs...

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Sat Jan 19 20:31:06 UTC 2008


Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot <at> laposte.net> writes:
> Complete disregard for tester efforts seems widespread. Complaining to
> reporters they didn't open an issue in the right place is common. So is
> ignoring bugs because supposedly they're not complete enough (without
> bothering to explain what complete would be). Even more annoying are
> maintainers that ask to do a lot of stuff then ignore completely the
> result.

I can fully understand your frustration, reporting a bug can be hard sometimes. 
However, please also try to understand the maintainer's side. You're 
maintaining a few packages yourself, have you never felt frustrated about:
* getting swamped with dozens of (non-Fedora-specific) bug reports against huge 
upstream projects, where technically you might be able to fix any of them, but 
you definitely don't have the time to fix them all? and/or
* occasionally getting bug reports which are so vague that you don't have the 
slightest chance of ever figuring out what went wrong, let alone reproducing 
them? (This is not always the reporters fault, by the way, some applications 
love crashing, drawing things incorrectly etc. for no apparent reason. See e.g. 
XChat's occasional weird graphical glitches which have been there for years 
because nobody understands what's happening. These things can frustrate the 
maintainer at least as much as the reporter.)
That's the situation of a lot of packages, and especially the first issue is a 
major one for KDE.

We're doing what we can to fix KDE bugs. In our case, the preferred way to 
handle things is:
* Please file bug reports both at Fedora and KDE, and cross-link them (use the 
upstream URL feature in our Bugzilla). Once you clicked through the "pick your 
component" wizard at bugs.kde.org, you can just copy&paste your entire 
formatted Fedora bug report into their freetext textbox. (Yes, it would be 
great if we could sync our bugzillas automatically, but unfortunately it's just 
not there, so someone has to do the copy&paste. It's better if the reporter 
does it because that way they'll get the bugmail. We know how to CC ourselves 
where it makes sense, CCing a reporter in a bug we file is harder because we 
can't know if you have a valid KDE bugzilla account nor if it's under the same 
e-mail address as the Fedora one.)
* We'll try to track the upstream bug report, but pinging us if upstream comes 
up with a fix can't hurt.
* The more urgent the bug, the more likely we are to apply a fix as soon as 
possible. Otherwise, we'll pick it up automatically once we upgrade to the next 
bugfix release of KDE. (We aren't pushing those updates just for fun, nor to 
sadistically break things as we're sometimes accused of.)

        Kevin Kofler




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