[Users] Claws Mail with LXDE and LXQt desktops

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 11:41:11 +0100, Dave Howorth wrote:

> Well I for one tried to reproduce the crash here (openSUSE Leap 15.0,
> claws 3.16.0, LXDE desktop) and failed. But I don't understand your
> point. How does it try to change the meaning of what I wrote?

This thread is not productive at all.

At least, you could have tried to reproduce with 3.17.6, since 3.16.0
is almost three years old. ;-)

> I expect upstream developers not to have specific knowledge of
> particular distros and to be unwilling to set up a test environment to
> replicate the problem, let alone try to solve it.

Still they should be consulted, since they may shed some light on whether
their program can be the culprit at all. For instance, the affected code
path may be completely outside the program. Also, a program's upstream
developers in most cases are interested in learning about runtime environments
where their software fails/crashes. Sometimes it's possible to implement
workarounds or to remove features that are deemed experimental/unstable.

> They are more likely
> instead to request the user to build a test environment using the latest
> version of their component instead of the distro-supplied version.

Not a bad idea, but simply compiling the program from scratch seldomly
makes a difference, since the build dependencies will be the same as used
for the prebuilt distro packages.

> Strangely, that's usually not what end users either want to do or are
> qualified to do.

Distro packagers are contacted by a large variety of different types of
users. Some of the users are supportive, they painstakingly fill out bug
report form details. Others dump tickets into bugzilla without adding a
single word, or they run unstable hardware and don't answer to questions.
There are also the infamous distro hoppers, who impatiently enter tickets
into the bug trackers of multiple distros without actually using a
distribution on a daily basis. There are also those, who ignore usage
recommendations, such as quitting programs before updating an installation.

> > Now the ball is back in the court of the bug reporter to go
> > elsewhere,
>
> This is where we disagree. The assignee can't pass it back to the OP -
> they are an end-user, not a qualified software person. They don't have
> the necessary skills. The packager should refer it to another packager,
> or three.
>
> Maybe this explains why I know nothing about fedora :)

What I've mentioned is not specific to Fedora.