On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:55 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 21:02 -0400, Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
> Maybe it is time to discuss the usefulness of ABRT to Fedora. I think
> that it is a great idea for commercial products such as RHEL, but it
> obviously did not fit Fedora as is.
I disagree. I have seen many bugs fixed with the aid of abrt feedback.
It beats the hell out of a bug report which says 'it crashed'.
Does it compare to this number? (it takes a while to open)
http://tinyurl.com/39yr832
> From what I have seen, the maintainers are more responsive to
manually
> filed bugs than to ABRT filed bugs (Am I wrong?). Apparently the
> current setup is driving users (such as the person in the above email)
> away who are otherwise willing to report bugs. This is not good.
>
> What can we do to make it better? Some ideas:
>
> 1.
> - ABRT stops reporting new bugs to Fedora.
> - The user does a self evaluation: Is the bugcoding related, or
> packaging related?
> - If he thinks the bug is packaging related, or if he's not sure, he
> manually files a bug to Fedora bugzilla. Otherwise he notifies the
> developers.
> - The package maintainer asks for a backtrace
> - User reproduces the crash, and puts the bug number in ABRT gui. ABRT
> posts the backtrace to the bug report as an attachment.
> - If the bug is coding related, the package maintainer can direct the
> user to the developers.
Hence I added "if he's not sure". Please read again.
This is not practical. Users are not in a position to know whether
the
crash is in downstream or upstream code.
> 2.
> There can be a checkbox in pkgdb for maintainers to turn off ABRT bug
> reporting for their packages.
This seems reasonable, for packagers who are not in a position to act on
such reports, but then, that's not a great position for a packager to be
in; for instance, I'm a packager who can't code so these reports are of
fairly limited value to me directly, but they would at least give me
good data to pass to the upstream coders of any package I own.
I played the middle man in some of the bug reports. The user did not
seem to want to contact the developer directly. The upstream asked for
something, and I forwarded it to the user. This went back and forth a
couple times until I realized that this was highly inefficient, and
mostly a waste of time (since one of the parties gave up eventually).
There's got to be a better way.
Orcan