bugzilla bugzappers?

[Orcan Ogetbil]

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