How you can help with upstream issues
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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