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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