Paddling Upstream

How the KDE developers approach upstream and downstream bugs...

"Matt Rogers recently added UPSTREAM as a report resolution type on bugs.kde.org for us. I asked for this because a lot of issues in Plasma were the result of bugs elsewhere in the stack and I hated closing those reports as INVALID since they were not INVALID at all: they just weren't something we could do anything about in the Plasma code base.

"Technically not all the bugs we close are really UPSTREAM, though. Some are DOWNSTREAM, namely the bugs caused by packaging foobars or poor backporting decision making and/or execution by OSVs (operating system vendors, aka 'distributions' in the Linux realm). However, since we don't have DOWNSTREAM as an option we mark them all as UPSTREAM, noting where in the stack the problem really is in the comments section." [Read more]