RFC: Adding distribution field to Bugzilla

[Sebastian Lackner]

On 07.10.2014 20:17, Austin English wrote:
> Howdy everyone,
> 
> I'd like to add a distribution field to Bugzilla, to make it easier to
> identify when users may have additional patches installed by their
> distribution and/or other distribution specific issues (e.g.,
> https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35413). It would be a drop down
> selection, with the major distributions listed (i.e., ArchLinux, Debian,
> Fedora, Gentoo, Mint, RedHat, Slackware, Suse, Ubuntu, other).
> 
> Comments/feedback welcome.
> 

I think its a good idea and it definitely doesn't hurt to ask for that. Not only in case of patched versions, it would also be useful to know if the user tries to use a broken Wine package (CentOS 7 for example, they provide a 64-Bit-only build). To ensure that users report their distribution as exactly as possible I would also suggest to list individual versions for each distro. We also get bug reports from time to time, where users still use a distro, that has been discontinued since several years ago, and they haven't noticed that yet. xD

The only disadvantage: There is still no guarantee that this information is sufficient.

* Gentoo USE flags ...
* Various different Ubuntu packages (official, ubuntu-wine, third-party, ...)
* Mints stupid decision to not install recommended packages by default, something that the Ubuntu/Debian packages rely on ...

I personally would also vote to include some better diagnostic methods into Wine itself, for example checking for missing libraries. Our wine builds already include such a feature (wine --check-libs), which allows us easily to verify, that the user is not missing something important, like 32-bit libxcomposite, libxrandr, ...

Regards,
Sebastian