[Users] Claws Mail with LXDE and LXQt desktops

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 01:52:40 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:

> I answered that in the text just below. (emphasis now added)

That would be the holy grail then. Given that Claws Mail doesn't crash for
some of the found test-cases, analysis/discussion of the crash ought to
start with guys that may be intimately familiar with the desktop
environments used in those test-cases. And in the case of GTK2, it
doesn't get much love anymore compared with GTK3.

> > It may be more than one distribution.
>
> Indeed, but we only know of one at present, and nobody else has come
> forward to say they are experiencing these problems elsewhere.

Well, how many have encountered the crash? Switching desktop theme
while Claws Mail is running isn't anything that can't be avoided easily.
Personally, I have never heard about that crash before and also don't
know whether it exists for a long time already.

> But in the case of distro-supplied packages, it is usual to report
> possible bugs to the distro in the first instance, and it is up to the
> distro to receive such reports, confirm and triage them, assign them to
> the correct support area (e.g. package maintainer), and resolve the
> problem locally or escalate to an appropriate upstream. Note that I
> have no knowledge of fedora specifically.

There's an awful lot of theory in that paragraph, which may apply to
commercial distributors, who maintain a controlled set of system component
packages with a service level agreement, but it doesn't apply to a large
scale community package collection. You expect community distro packagers
to be more familiar with multiple system components than, for example,
upstream developers. You also expect them to have access to test
environments that would match the bug reporters setup.

> > Serving as a proxy between a bug reporter and several bug trackers
> > doesn't scale well.
>
> Sorry I don't understand what you're saying here.

Assume a ticket has been dumped into Fedora bugzilla in a semi-automated
way using the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool, which is what quite some users
do these days without adding details on reproducibility. The assignee of
the ticket takes a look and concludes that the bug report ought to be
discussed somewhere else. Now the ball is back in the court of the bug
reporter to go elsewhere, possibly subscribe to a mailing-list or open
an account in an upstream tracker, as to continue there and to be available
as to answer questions. It is wrong to assume that the distro packager can
take over all that. In the case of subject, LXDE/LXQT/XFCE/Mate are
completely unrelated to Claws Mail.

> I would expect that Fedora's Claws Mail packagers would determine where
> the problem lay and reassign the bug to the appropriate Fedora package.
> The Fedora packagers should contact upstream if necessary by default,
> not the OP, since they are better placed to explain where the problem
> has been located and to integrate and test the fix.

Nobody is "better placed", unless it's someone with intimate knowledge
of the used components/frameworks/DEs and enough spare time at hand
to contribute something. What may be necessary to fix it is not known
yet.

For one of the two bugs that have lead to this topic I have given
some background before. You need to read the few comments, though,
also the one for the libX11 merge request:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gtk+2.0/+bug/1808710