Looking for KWin Bug Triagers

At the moment all incoming KWin bugs are managed by the developer community. This is actually not a really good solution as we have a high count of duplicate crash reports and also many bugs where we have to ask again and again for the same things (e.g. providing driver information or providing the list of loaded effects). Obviously if developers spend time on managing the bugs they cannot fix bugs in this time.

KWin is in the very lucky situation to have a cleaned up bugtracker. This means we don’t have old junk in the tracker and our bugs are nicely categorized by being put into the right categories. So becoming a triager would not mean cleaning up the old stuff but only help us with incoming bug reports. And that are in fact not that many – we get about 20 new bug reports per week.

For us developers it would be really helpful to only get the final and real bugreports. That is reports which have a way how to reproduce the issue and all needed information to properly investigate an issue.

So your task as a bug triager for KWin would include:

  • Finding Duplicate crash reports (very easy as DrKonqui adds the number of possible duplicates)
  • Identifying clear driver crashes (relatively easy if you understand a little bit about reading backtraces)
  • Escalating if a driver crash is reported too often, so that we can consider adding a workaround
  • Adding meta-information to the report: version, component, flags
  • Verify that the bug is reproducable
  • Add the steps to reproduce a bug if it is missing
  • Identify actual user support issues and send the user to forum.kde.org
  • Discard all Wishlist reports and send user to brainstorm.forum.kde.org

As we currently read all reports and are used to work with the bugtracker we can provide help and you can start by just watching our work in the bugtracker by following the shared bugzilla user. If you have questions about why we for example set a bug to duplicate I’m happy to explain that and for that I would prefer using #kde-bugs on freenode.net so that many bug triagers can get the information.

We would be glad to welcome you as a KWin Bug Triager and your help to make KWin a better window manager will be highly appreciated.If you are interested please leave a note, send a mail to kwin@kde.org or just ping me in #kde-bugs.

9 Replies to “Looking for KWin Bug Triagers”

  1. This is a great idea, is there some place where one can go to view the bug reports for kwin? If the bug has already been reported the user would then know where to look to find out if a bug report was actually needed to be sent. I have tried myself to send in bug reports for kwin and every time I get the response that the debug info for kwin is not installed. Well I assure it is, possibly it’s installed in the wrong directory. But if that’s the case all the debug files on my computer are installed on the wrong directory, Yet they work fine? I get a kwin crash everytime I run khangman and enter a duplicate guess on a correct or incorrect character. Possibly khangman is utilizing an interrupt that conflicts with kwin? I wouldn’t know, I haven’t been able to get a successful backtrace ever with kwin.

    1. all bug reports for kwin are on bugs.kde.org. If DrKonqui tells you the debug packages are missing I would suggest to contact the support of your distribution. I don’t see a reason why khangman should crash KWin – at least it’s not doing that for me 😉

  2. Now that’s a good Idea – not sure what all this fuzz with suboptimal wordings from many sides (probably some of the worst ones from myself, I have to admit) before was good for…

      1. Well, that’s kind of cool — now I’ve discovered saved and shared searches in KDE bugzilla. That’s not, like, wildly advertised anywhere that I know of (feel free to correct me by pointing at Techbase). For others: log in to bugs.kde.org, go to preferences, choose tab “Saved Searches” and check the KWin searches in the list of searches shared by others.

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