ABRT unusable again

Karel Klic kklic at redhat.com
Sun Feb 7 02:15:50 UTC 2010


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.

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.

For some packages, reporting upstream could work well (Firefox, 
OpenOffice.org come to my mind). However, many packages have 
unresponsive/dead upstream, upstream without issue tracker etc.

See rhbz#532307 for a beautiful example of cross-package bugfixing, 
which is very hard to do in upstream. At least eight applications will 
be fixed at the end (e.g. #542277, #547030, #550165, #558329, #561592, 
#561059)

Karel


More information about the devel mailing list