On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 07:42:49PM +0100, Kris De Gussem wrote:

Hi all

I was wondering how to deal with bug reports automatically submitted by the operating system. It is often hard to verify for these bugs how exactly one could to provoke the issue but on the other hand it may be clear from the backtrace that some null pointer check (or related thing) is missing).

See for example https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/inkscape/+bug/1172484 for which I added a patch. See for example https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/inkscape/+bug/1219264 which might be solved by trunk revision 12851 (or maybe revision 12838).

Do we mark these reports as fix committed (although we do not know how to provoke the issue)? Do we add a patch and wait for a specific amount of time for reactions? Any experiences on how is it dealt with for Ubuntu?

Hi K, good question. Here's what I think based on handling such bugs in ubuntu for X.org.

Launchpad allows having multiple bug tasks. In these two examples there are a distro bug task "Inkscape (Ubuntu)" and an upstream project bug task "Inkscape".

If you're reasonably certain the bug is fixed in the current mainline branch, but the fix is not yet included in any official release, you can state you believe it's fixed upstream, give a pointer to the patch (or even better attach the patch to the bug report), and mark the upstream project bug task as Fix Completed. If the fix is in an official release, it can be marked Fix Released.

If you're only caring about the upstream side, you can stop here.

On the distro side, the next step is to ask the bug report(s) test the patch and set the distro bug task to Incomplete. Often it is helpful to create a new ubuntu package in a PPA with the fix, so it's easy for bug reporters to test. In any case, once the fix is verified, the distro packagers create an updated package with the bug fix and publish it for ubuntu.

Anyway, that's how it generally works for ubuntu.

Hope this helps, Bryce