FS#57529 - Remove DrKonqi from plasma group and plasma-meta package

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Mélanie Chauvel (ariasuni) - Friday, 16 February 2018, 11:04 GMT
Last edited by Doug Newgard (Scimmia) - Tuesday, 20 February 2018, 04:45 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

On Arch Linux, DrKonqi is useless by default because there’s no debug symbols, at least for now[1].

This causes a significant lost of time for both users (who create useless bug reports) and KDE developers (who need to mark as invalid and explain again why it’s useless).

My proposition is to remove DrKonqi from the default selection, both in plasma group and plasma-meta package. An experienced user could still manually install debug symbols and DrKonqi.

[1]:  FS#38755 
This task depends upon

Closed by  Doug Newgard (Scimmia)
Tuesday, 20 February 2018, 04:45 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't implement
Comment by Antonio Rojas (arojas) - Friday, 16 February 2018, 23:20 GMT
Although I understand the reasoning behind this request, I'm not fully convinced, for several reasons:
1) Backtraces without debug symbols can still be useful, if not for fixing the bug, at least for identifying if it is a duplicate (which can be useful to assess the severity of the bug by the number of duplicates) or to detect bugs caused by video drivers or third party libraries. Without drkonqi, users will simply report "Plasma is crashing" which is definitely useless. Even if only a small fraction of the users report the crash this way, it will still waste developer's time.
2) The way to get proper backtraces in Arch is properly documented on our wiki. Sure, it is not as simple as adding an additional repo, but the average Arch user should not have problems following the instructions if they are really interested in helping fix the issue. After all, Arch users are used to compiling stuff from AUR.
3) Most importantly: drkonqi already has code to rate backtraces and allow submitting only those with enough information. If the rating algorithm is broken and allows sending incomplete backtraces, then KDE should fix drkonqi instead of expecting distros and users to discourage reporting crashes.

Anyhow, we should get proper debug repos soon™, so this will stop being an issue.

Loading...