On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 8:39 AM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 10:13 AM, Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer@fedoraproject.org>
> wrot:e
>>
>> How do you plan on addressing the problem reporting issue? In your
>> example, the Inkscape package will still exist in RPM form for other
>> Editions. That means there are potentially two versions of Inkscape,
>> one from upstream and one packaged in Fedora. How do you ensure
>> problem reports are routed to the correct issue tracker?
>
>
> Something Flatpak, or any other packaging method, could make easier for
> developers and users is integrating an in-app bug reporting mechanism.

That is a thing that could be done.

> The packager chooses which (and possibly more than one) bug tracking system
> to use and bakes that into the application in a way that abstracts the user
> from this very long standing mess. So upstream packaged applications would
> behind the scene submit the bug to the upstream preferred bug reporting
> system; and Fedora packages applications to RHBZ or upstream or both.

One of the issues with this idea is scale. It requires app developers
to do this. Not every app developer will do this. Which means the
distributions are still going to have to solve this problem.

The idea is to provide the incentive to opt in. By virtue of creating a Flatpak packaged application, filling in a few blanks, your app and your users get bug reporting almost for free. It's like a bug reporting API. A reference implementation that uses RHBZ or even GNOME's BZ would also incentivize this quite a bit, not least of which is someone will want to write a github backend for the thing pretty quickly.

There isn't much to be done about upstreams who don't care about user feedback, or possess an impressive quantity of hubris necessary to not recognize how much of a pain it is to track down where to file bugs and sign up for that bug reporting system - per application. Ha, I mean, there could be some comedy sketches I could think of to make fun of them. But that's not a technical solution to the problem.

Chris Murphy