Kevin Kofler wrote:
Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus wrote:
However, in the meantime I stopped reporting crashes via ABRT because I think it raises the load for a package maintainer to high while the report should go directly to upstream. Bothering the maintainer first instead of upstream is not the right thing to do.
+1, in fact that's the biggest design failure in ABRT (in its current state) and basically makes it useless. Gathering backtraces is something that needs to be handled by upstream projects (like KDE does with KCrash/DrKonqi), not distributions.
Some maintainers fix crashes in their packages and then send the fixes to the upstream, and some don't. Some crashes are caused by distribution-specific environment, and some are not :) It's not clear whether we should report crashes directly to the upstream.
For some packages, reporting upstream could work well (Firefox, OpenOffice.org come to my mind). However, many packages have unresponsive/dead upstream, upstream without issue tracker etc.
See rhbz#532307 for a beautiful example of cross-package bugfixing, which is very hard to do in upstream. At least eight applications will be fixed at the end (e.g. #542277, #547030, #550165, #558329, #561592, #561059)
Karel