Hello,

I think it would be beneficial to disable the KDE crash handling and
enable apport for KDE applications.

The rationale:
The goal is to get useful crash reports to bugs.kde.org.

Currently, a user has to have debug packages installed to generate a
useful report at all. Then the user has to manually send it to
launchpad or to bugs.kde.org, and the user has to choose. The effect
is that few crashes get reported, and the majority of those have
useless backtraces. Then, to get a useful report upstream, a triager
has to look at a Launchpad report, ask the user to install debug
packages, wait and hope the crash happens again and the user posts a
new backtrace, then report the bug upstream. And then the bug has
less information than apport collects automatically.

With apport we gain automatic reporting and automatic retracing so
nobody has to worry about having the debug packages installed. Once
an apport report is in Launchpad it has most if not all of the needed
information and a triager can refile it upstream, and that report will
be a better one than most on bugs.kde.org. The downside of automatic
reporting is that all crashes go to launchpad and not upstream.
However, given the increased quantity of quality reports, I think we
will get more good reports upstream by looking through apport reports
on Launchpad and refiling the relevant ones at bugs.kde.org than we do
with the current system.

In addition, apport provides a consistent crash handler across all
applications instead of having a different GUI and different
procedures for KDE vs. QT-only applications. Just compare the simple
bug reporting instructions for Ubuntu[1] to the ones I started writing
up for Kubuntu[2]. And you can enable/disable the crash dialogs in
one place. Currently apport crash reporting gets disabled for stable
releases, but KCrash dialogs are still there.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
[2] https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Bugs/Reporting

~ Yuriy

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How closely are apport reported bugs watched? Are there people who
regularly go over such reports? Do you think we have enough people
who would watch for KDE bugs reported with apport and send them
upstream as appropriate?

Can you point us at an example or two of (presumably non-KDE) bugs
where this has happened?

Jonathan

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On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jriddell@ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> How closely are apport reported bugs watched? Are there people who
> regularly go over such reports? Do you think we have enough people
> who would watch for KDE bugs reported with apport and send them
> upstream as appropriate?
Hard to tell right now since there aren't any (or very few) of these
reports for KDE. Anybody in ubuntu bug control can see these reports,
but some may not know that others can't (I didn't consider that until
recently and had to go and make public a bunch of reports for
nosrednaekim to view). So if these people are looking through bug
reports normally, they'll be touching the apport ones as well.
There's just a little extra education needed on how those are
different.

From a quick look through the members list[1], we have these Kubuntu
people who should be able to look at those bugs:
me, txwikinger, manchicken, ryanakca, fdoving
And these people's memberships are for some reason expired or
deactivated, and I encourage them to rejoin (though most have the
privileges anyway through MOTU or core-dev):
xerosis, lure, mhb, nixternal, hobbsee, scottK

With apport marking duplicates automatically, I think that's enough
manpower, or at least not a regression from status-quo. Anybody else
who's been working on bugs for Kubuntu, please consider applying to
bugcontrol!

>
> Can you point us at an example or two of (presumably non-KDE) bugs
> where this has happened?

A couple examples (from searching for bugs tagged apport-crash and
with the bug reported upstream):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/180626
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-applets/+bug/122594

[1] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-bugcontrol/+members

~ Yuriy

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