Hi!

I appreciate that people test the new Plasma 6 and report issues.

Often enough an issue reported is actually an upstream issue. It might be
a changed behavior compared to Plasma 5 and so on. If it is an upstream
issue you can help tremendously by checking whether it is reported on https://bugs.kde.org and if it is not report it there. Then include the upstream bug report number in your Debian report in case you still like to report with Debian. IMHO not every upstream issue needs to be reported
with Debian. Reasons for reporting with Debian could be: It is severe
enough. Or… getting close to the next release, including a patch from upstream could help the next stable Plasma experience tremendously.

In case you are not sure whether what you see is actually a bug or not, I strongly recommend to ask here first for advice. Asking here first is likely to bring more attention of other users to the issue whether they see it as well or not and so on. And you might receive tips on how to fix the issue
at hand. Asking in a bug report whether an issue is an issue… can incur a much higher delay for getting a response.

Why my plea? The Debian Qt/KDE team is quite small, the Plasma, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear stacks are quite large and dealing with upstream
issues takes some extra time. A member of the team would have to check
whether it is reported upstream and if not, report it there, and then
ideally follow up on questions from upstream and so on. However instead of scratching "only" one's own upstream itch ideally all of the upstream
issues need to be dealt with. So it is not one upstream issue, it might
easily be dozens of them, if not hundreds or more, lingering in the Debian
bug tracker. So by scratching your own upstream itch by doing that extra
work you help tremendously.

We already have way to less time spend on bug triaging, mainly because
without packaging the new versions there might be not much to triage to
begin with. Quality packaging takes time. A lot of time. Even with a ton
of automation help involved – which needs to be developed and tested as well, like the fine QML dependency helper by Sandro. So the more upstream issues Qt/KDE team members need to handle themselves, the greater the
chance that there is simply no volunteer time left over all the other work
and other spare time activities of each team member to actually react and address such a bug report. So the more you are willing to do that extra
work for reporting your upstream issue yourself, the higher the chances
are it will be dealt with. And the more time team members have to spend on important packaging work.

This is not ill will, this is just the situation we have. I wanted to take some of my time to explain this to you so you are aware and know how you
can help.

Please keep testing Plasma 6 and new versions of applications! I
appreciate it.

Best,
--
Martin - please no carbon copy to me

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Hi Aurélien, hi.

Aurélien COUDERC - 12.12.24, 13:19:34 MEZ:

So I strongly advise to only report bugs upstream directly :
- If the version of the Debian package matches the latest upstream
release. That's currently the case for Plasma and kf6 in
trixie/unstable but would never be the case for stable.

Thanks! You are right. This is an important aspect. Upstream is overworked
as well. And there are way to help them. Actually as far as I saw so far, almost every free software project is overworked on bug triaging.

I focused this mostly on Plasma 6 and so on from unstable and forgot a bit about the old stuff, so it is good you bring that in! But even with KDE software from unstable: some is not yet up to date. For for example for
latest KDEPIM is in experimental, but not in unstable currently. As for packages in experimental, it may be good to ask / report here first, before reporting a Debian bug.

It is not useful for upstream to report any issues on Plasma 5 or for that matter for any KDE Gear stuff which still relies on KDE Frameworks 5 unless they also happen in latest or almost latest upstream version.

Diverging a bit from your recommendation I'd say if you run Plasma, let's
say 6.2.4 and upstream just released Plasma 6.2.5 a few days ago, an
upstream report may still be helpful, in case you have checked whether it
is reported already. Probably after also looking in upstream announcement whether the issue has been fixed meanwhile. I think it would be
unreasonable to expect users to always be on the newest upstream release
on the day of release. Upstream themselves word it as:

"...using relatively recent versions of KDE software (≤ 1 year old) or an LTS supported version"

Here you can find more information on upstream bug reporting:

https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting

As well as triaging:

https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging

This is really a great way to help out both in Debian and in upstream. And
you do not need to be a developer for that. Also you can help out in
little pieces as your schedule allows for it.

- Once you've double checked that no existing bug report in bugs.kde.org already describes the issue you're having.

I mentioned that. But yes… please avoid duplicates in the upstream bug tracker.

Best,
--
Martin

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Hi Martin,

Le 12 décembre 2024 11:02:08 GMT+01:00, Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de> a écrit :

Hi!

I appreciate that people test the new Plasma 6 and report issues.

Often enough an issue reported is actually an upstream issue. It might be
a changed behavior compared to Plasma 5 and so on. If it is an upstream >issue you can help tremendously by checking whether it is reported on >https://bugs.kde.org and if it is not report it there.

Yes and no. 🙂

While it's true that the team is small and the KDE package set is big the general recommendation is to open bugs in the Debian bug tracker first.

Upstream tends to be overworked too and triaging bugs is not fun for most people.

For example we get negative to hostile feedback from upstream when our users report bugs… that have already been fixed upstream !

So I strongly advise to only report bugs upstream directly :
- If the version of the Debian package matches the latest upstream release. That's currently the case for Plasma and kf6 in trixie/unstable but would never be the case for stable.
- Once you've double checked that no existing bug report in bugs.kde.org already describes the issue you're having.

On a side note any kind of help in triaging, reproducing, adding information or closing Debian KDE bugs is highly welcome.

https://wiki.debian.org/BugTriage has a lot of useful information on how help.


Thanks & happy bug traging,
--
Aurélien

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