Bug triaging help needed

Call to Action 2 Minutes

For many years now, I and others have been working on getting plasmashell’s open bug reports as accurate and actionable as possible.

We’ve made tremendous progress, driving down the number of unconfirmed bug reports to its lowest levels in over a decade, and mostly keeping it there:

In case you’re worried about the “confirmed” count rising, it includes almost 800 feature requests. The actual number of known and confirmed bugs is about 1,100, and is not consistently rising. Also, the big spike was from a mass move of bug reports into plasmashell to make it easier to centrally track shell bugs over time.

Right now we’re at a point where we’re down to about 160 unconfirmed reports, and we need your help to get that down as close to 0 as possible.

Why do we need your help?

Because most of the remaining unconfirmed bugs are really hard to reproduce and confirm. They can only be understood or reproduced by someone with specialized hardware, uncommon software, specialized configurations, specific VPN setups, domain-specific knowledge, and so on. Others were reported in a state where the author doesn’t know how to reproduce the issue and none of us has been able to, either.

The addition of your valuable eyeballs and brains can help figure out what the heck is going on in these reports!

How to help

Go to https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&list_id=3586535&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cdupecount%20DESC%2Cshort_desc%2Cproduct%2Clongdescs.count%20DESC%2Cbug_id%20DESC&product=plasmashell&query_format=advanced, and…

  • Figure out the pattern for issues that are reported to happen “randomly” or “sometimes”.
  • If you have the hardware, configuration, or specialized software necessary to try to reproduce an issue described as specific to it, try.
  • If you’re familiar with upstream software like the Qt, PipeWire, Bluez, graphics drivers or the Linux kernel, help identify bug reports whose issue is upstream of KDE.

What it takes

  1. Use the latest released version of Plasma. that’s 6.7.4 as of the time of writing. A distro that uses git master versions of things is even better.
  2. Use a distro that ships KDE software as “vanilla” as possible, with a minimum of distro-specific customizations. Either as your daily driver, or in a VM. Arch Linux and KDE Linux are good options here, and Fedora KDE is okay too. Highly opinionated distros can still work, but are not as ideal for bug triage.
  3. Read through and understand https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging.
  4. Be nice. You’ll be a part of KDE’s public face!

And that’s it! Bug triaging help is really appreciated here.

I would absolutely love it if we could get the number of UNCONFIRMED plasmashell bugs down to 0, and then keep them that way by pouncing on every single new one as it comes in.

You can help make that possible! Thanks, everyone.

Unknown's avatar

Published by Nate

Published

4 thoughts on “Bug triaging help needed”

  1. Hi, Nate. I’ve shared your call for help over at the forum of EndeavourOS, an arch distro.

    hopefully some of the people there have the required setup, hardware or software.

    thanks for all the work you do.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  2. Looking at the bottom of the list, there is a bunch of X11 bugs (read just the title). Can those be closed now that X11 is deprecated?

    Like

    Reply

    1. I keep debating when it would actually be appropriate to close them, and my conclusion so far has been once Plasma 6.7 goes out of support. That’s November 3rd of this year.

      Plasma 6.6 is an LTS version that does still technically support X11. But if I can put on my Techpaladin Software CEO hat for a moment, for that case we’ve only committed to offering commercial support for the Wayland session. And I’m not aware of anyone else out there who will be caring about fixing bugs in Plasma 6.6’s X11 session.

      So from my perspective, November 3rd is the day. 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

Leave a comment