Hello Planet KDE (and how to deal with bug reports)
Hi everyone, my name is Darío Andrés Rodríguez and you may (not) know me because of my work at bugs.kde.org
As you know, we currently have a lot of bug reports in our database, because:
- Software crashes and have bugs 🙂 (humans aren’t perfect even if we dislike that fact..)
- Some bug reports did not get attention in the last…. 3~4 years. There are a lot of reported issues which may be fixed already with the current KDE SC versions.
- Some bug descriptions and situations are difficult to interpret and to identify (and/or to reproduce).
- We are few people working on a big database (lots of different products of the KDE community).
- The “normal” bug reporting wizard has some flaws (Matt Rogers is working on it, with some really nice ideas ;)).
- The crash reporting tool in KDE SC 4.3 suffered from my own miscalculations on how much useful a report could be (and I was not really expecting that much reports and feedback to be sent).
About this last issue, I have already polished the tool’s logic to try to get better quality reports (only if the user can tell use about the crash context or some other information). I also added some hints and examples in order to “estimulate” the reporter’s memory and senses to get more relevant information. [KDE SC 4.4]
In order to improve this situations my next steps will be:
- Look forward to a “two bugdays per month” scheme. + Integrating the current bugday method (techbase page) with the KDE forums and the Klassroom/Kourses initiative. (in order to bring more people to help us using a more friendly interface/contact point).
- Design a personal roadmap/plan in order to efficiently try to triage and clean all the incoming reports from the last months. (yes, I feel guilty, several reports were caused by my own mistakes).
- Try to encourage more people to work with us (I know I know…, dealing with bug reports all the day is boring and, sometimes, depressing; but in the other hand you feel great because you are helping both developers and users to get their work done, and people is really thankful).
[Personally I find myself “useful” while working on bugs.kde.org]
If you have some idea or criticism to add, leave a comment. You can usually find me on #kde-bugs at FreeNode too.
I hope I can help you and you can help *us* (because we are KDE)
PS: I almost forgot, we have a Facebook group (useless, I know): “I can’t help it, I must close KDE bugs now!”
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Darío Andrés @ KDE 
Dario, thanks so much for your work on bko. Without your help and the help of the bugsquad it would be impossible to triage all that bugs. You’re for sure in the list of my heroes! 🙂
Congrats!
Your comment confirms my own words about devs being thankful ^_^
Thanks!
+1 for more bugdays
+1 for personal triaging, I’m doing a bit this days 🙂
+1000 for recruiting new contributers
About the last point I’ll try do do something on the next weeks. Developers and triagers are really needed!!!
Welcome on the Planet Darío and thanks for your work!
Also a big thank you from me for helping out with the huge number of Dolphin reports. Especially finding the duplicates is a huge help. Your work helps us developers to be able to concentrate on bugfixing and to minimize the (huge) efforts to keep the bug data base clean.
Darío,
One comment about the crash reporting tool and a real world example.
A VERY useful feature in the crash reporting tool would be to check the current released version of a component and warn the reporter if they are not using the currently released version.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210462 is currently sitting as the sixth most often reported bug.
Without getting into the issues behind the report, Ubuntu released digikam beta5 as a component of their karmic release. Unfortunately beta5 had a nasty habit of crashing, which was quickly fixed in beta6, with subsequent rc and 1.0.0 final releases.
Anyway back to the Ubuntu users, and there are a lot of them, and this component doesn’t get updated until lucid in April, again lets not go down that hole about release cycles.
So current Ubuntu users get this crash from using beta5, they get presented the crash reporting tool and follow through we end up with a trivial bug as the six most reported, and our lead developer is doing the bulk of the triage himself. Not good use of limited KDE resources..
My wish for the bug reporting wizard, is that the user on beta5 gets the crash, the bug wizard says hey I see you are using beta5, are you aware that 1.0.0 final has been released and probably fixes your issue, you are recommended to upgrade to the current release before submitting your crash report.
This way the increases the use of current released components and it decreases the case of users submitting reports against obsolete versions.
Mark
I really like that idea and in fact, I thought about it some time ago. The problem is that we need to have a central point to check for the “most recent” (stable or devel) version of all the KDE applications.. may be it can be done
So far, the KDE SC 4.4 version has a smarter possible duplicate handling. The reporter gets messages like “the issue is fixed” (if, in fact, a possible duplicate report is closed as fixed), and we encourage they to quit and to not report…
Thanks for the feedback