> So then you're NOT interested in bug reports from users. On the contrary, I'm very interested in bug reports from users. But bug reports are contributions to a participative development process, not a customer service inquiry. You're informing us you've noticed what may be a bug; we're going to use this information as we see fit to make our software better.
> While "resolved" may satisfy your needs, there's no reason an additional flag > couldn't be added. Something like "Dependency Broken" perhaps. That's exactly what "RESOLVED UPSTREAM" means. As a developer I agree that Bugzilla could be improved for our needs, by the way, and by extension the needs of our users, but this ticket isn't the place to discuss Bugzilla improvements. > You are strongly implying I should have the same skills & knowledge as a > developer of your product, if I want to use your product. No, I think you misread that. I don't think you should need to have the same skills and knowledge as I do (in fact Konversation stands to benefit more if you bring different skills and knowledge to the table). I do expect you to be aware of the mode in which Konversation is developed (by volunteers, non-commercially, in the open) and have more than your own needs on your agenda, e.g. the need for us to triage reports and decide where to spend finite resources to help the most users. If you can't do that, I recommend switching to a product that offers a different kind of relation with you indeed. I've spent 8 years and hundreds of hours on improvements to Konversation, most of them due to suggestions or inquiries by users. Some of my fellow developers have been around even longer. I have a very clean conscience about my contributions to the bottom line here. > The average user doesn't care who is responsible, s/he simply wants to have a > working system. That might accurately reflect the status-quo, but isn't a desirable state of things, partly because it's not sustainable. We don't have the resources to hide the complexity of the development process from users or succeed without your help. If we did, we'd also fail to recruit new developers to replace those who move on. We also feel that doing so does users a disservice in the long run, since you don't have the full picture to make useful decisions. > The user cannot be expected to understand the details of the relationship > between subsystems, and so it falls to the developer to notify and interact > with the system vendor, else it is likely that the problem will not get fixed. This is true, and you'll be relieved to hear that this communication happens all the time. The Konversation team (as well as many other people in KDE) maintain strong relations with many distros, and many bugfixes that distros end up pushing to users also in lower-level components are the result of us asking them to ship them. We talk literally every day, and improving this communication (e.g. by linking bug trackers to maintain upstream/downstream references for the same problem) is an active topic of conversation. However, in this case it's not reasonable from a resource POV to do this until the bug has been confirmed to exist with a more recent version of Qt. The vast majority of our users use a newer Qt and we're not seeing the same crash report from them. Nothing in this report allows me to reproduce the crash with the software I have. I could spend hours setting up a system with Qt 4.8.2 and try to reproduce it there only to find out that it's been fixed in Qt 4.8.3, or I can't reproduce it at all and we're none the wiser. These are the kinds of decisions I need to make all the time when deciding where to spend a finite amount of time to address the needs and concerns of many users. I'm not saying you should have been born with an awareness of that, I'm just trying to explain the background to the reaction you felt was offensive to you, and hope you can understand it better. > "Whatever you do, avoid Konversation because it keeps crashing and the > developer doesn't care." I know this to be false; I care greatly. > I would hope that's not the result you want to see You might also be interested to learn that guilting people and blackmailing them with threats tends to have the opposite effect of what you think it has, especially with volunteer-driven development. Instead of being spurned by their honor to help you, people instead become depressed and burn out. In fact, protecting fellow developers from people who maintain their human relationships in this fashion is a particular concern of mine. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1269199 Title: Qt library crashes To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/konversation/+bug/1269199/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
