On 02/07/2010 03:15 AM, Karel Klic wrote:
Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus wrote:
>> However, in the meantime I stopped reporting crashes via ABRT because I
>> think it raises the load for a package maintainer to high while the
>> report should go directly to upstream. Bothering the maintainer first
>> instead of upstream is not the right thing to do.
>
> +1, in fact that's the biggest design failure in ABRT (in its current state)
> and basically makes it useless. Gathering backtraces is something that needs
> to be handled by upstream projects (like KDE does with KCrash/DrKonqi), not
> distributions.
To end-users, it's irrelevant "who is supposed to fix something". Their
complaints are against the product call Fedora and thus expect "Fedora
to fix their product".
That said: It's irrelevant to Toyota car owners, which supplier
manufactured the parts which have caused Toyota to call back 1000 of
their cars - To them it's Toyota who is reponisible, and Toyota's duty
to fix this issue.
Some maintainers fix crashes in their packages and then send the
fixes
to the upstream, and some don't. Some crashes are caused by
distribution-specific environment, and some are not :) It's not clear
whether we should report crashes directly to the upstream.
History tells, low quality automated bug reports to be ignored and to
cause a lot of bad blood. Debian for instance has an unfortunate history
in doing so - You're better off to learn from their historic mistakes!
For some packages, reporting upstream could work well (Firefox,
OpenOffice.org come to my mind).
You mean big, well-known projects with a
fully-blown up infrastructure
and bureaucracy in place. It's naive to expect such an infrastructure to
be in place for all projects.
However, many packages have
unresponsive/dead upstream, upstream without issue tracker etc.
Read my previous
sentence.
Also take into account that many upstreams will consider automated bug
reports, to be "simply SPAM", esp. when the find them to be of low
quality. If you're lucky, they will simply ignore them, if you're less
lucky, they will confront you with very harsh responses.
Finally: Why are we discussing this here?
This is all should have been part of ABRT's concepts, its upstream
should have considered and resolved before unleashing ABRT.