I’m using my computer. A bug happens. The sigabrt process tells me it killed the process and I should report it. I click “Report” It goes through all the “backtracing” and “logging” and all the rest, AND THEN IT TELLS ME I NEED TO ENTER THE DAMN BUGZILLA API KEY IN ORDER TO FILE THE REPORT!!!
This is ridiculous! How do you ever debug anything if no one can file a damn report?!!
What is this stupid key it keeps asking for?! Why isn’t it IN THERE ALREADY?!!
That’s a Fedora question, not something that KDE is responsible for.
There is some relevant discussion on the Fedora forums about the (suboptimal) state of things:
Looks like a problem with your distro.
I’ve been reporting KDE bugs for years, on various distros (Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Manjaro, CachyOS) and never seen that message before.
Yet another reason to switch to CachyOS. Thanks.
I figured it was a KDE thing, since it’s a KDE bug that keeps happening… So the Distro controls the bug-reporting, then?
I think this is a good reason to switch to CachyOS… Been thinking about it… This might have pushed me over the edge.
It depends on the nature of the bug. As said in the Fedora thread:
The DrKonqi handler picks up anything it knows as registered KDE components, and everything else goes to ABRT. [i.e. the Fedora bug reporting component]
Distros can ship their own crash reporting tool, and to my knowledge Fedora and Ubuntu (and some of their downstream distros) do. Most others don’t.
For the ones that don’t, KDE’s own DrKonqi crash reporting tool can be used, if it’s installed.
Distros build the software so they have a large degree of freedom on what it ends up shipping.
They can use various build options to enable or disable things, they can alter the code (patching) and build this instead of the upstream release.
They can ship configuration files that change the default runtime behavior for users who don’t have their own config yet or haven’t changed that particular setting from the upstream default.
This flexibility can allow them to adapt each software so they fit better together, like preferring a different version of a library or service than what upstream would have chosen.
This flexibility comes with the responsibility to take care that any such alteration is gets tested by those who make them but corner cases can always slip through.
An API key is usually provided at build time so that it can’t be accidentally deleted as a separate file so an error indicating that it is missing (or not valid) is more often a distro issue than an upstream issue.
Obviously hard to tell from a user’s point of view as this is a level of detail that should normally not even come up.
