Bug 505735

Summary: plasmashell crash handler Send button greyed out with no indication why - make mandatory field indicate the mandatory action
Product: [Applications] drkonqi Reporter: Grzegorz Wierzowiecki <gwpublic>
Component: generalAssignee: Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs-null>
Status: ASSIGNED ---    
Severity: wishlist CC: ivan.cukic, kdedev, nate
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: 6.3.5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Arch Linux   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments: crash handler always getting stuck forever and not able to send

Description Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2025-06-18 11:32:45 UTC
Created attachment 182355 [details]
crash handler always getting stuck forever and not able to send

Product: Plasma Workspace
Component: Crash Handler ( drkonqi  ? )
Severity: Major
Platform: Linux (specify distribution and version)

Description:
When plasmashell crashes, the KDE Crash Handler (DrKonqi) progress bar freezes around 50% and never completes. As a result, no crash data or backtrace is submitted upstream. This appears to affect all recent Plasma versions and distributions.

Reproduction Steps:
1. Trigger a plasmashell crash (e.g., killall -SEGV plasmashell).
2. Observe the Crash Handler dialog; the progress bar stalls.
3. No report is sent and no link is provided.

Expected Result:
DrKonqi should collect all relevant logs and backtrace, then submit or provide a link to the bug report.

Actual Result:
Data collection hangs indefinitely with no submission.
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2025-06-18 15:50:33 UTC
Is your network connection notably slow?
Comment 2 Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2025-06-18 19:59:11 UTC
Just tested with rust speed test util and got 91MBps over my wall cable, (and my router has 1Gbps) and my provided has very good backbone connectivity, so network is perfect and works prefectly well with every sercie I want to use
Comment 3 TraceyC 2025-06-24 00:14:58 UTC
When Dr Konqi has appeared on my system, I've noticed that while it appears to hang around the middle of processing (and the system will offer to close it as non-responsive), if I wait the process does finish. 

Out of curiosity, how long have you waited for Dr Konqi to finish?
Also, if you bring up Crashed Process Viewer, do you see an entry for Dr Konqi? I'd like to determine if it actually crashed or was just hung.


As a side note, unfortunately, sending a SIGSEV to plasmashell manually on my system doesn't trigger the Crash Handler dialog.
Comment 4 Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2025-06-25 21:32:12 UTC
> Out of curiosity, how long have you waited for Dr Konqi to finish?

whole day window was left open in the background.

Many times actually. (for some reason when I am changing multiple screens configuration plasma is crashing and restarting so I have this Dr Konqi popup from time to time, always select to download debugging symbols , so I could submit so you know about bug/crash but never finishes..., therefore probably there are more people like me so you are being informed about less crashes that actually happen...)
Comment 5 TraceyC 2025-06-26 16:48:06 UTC
Can you try disabling the option to automatically download crash symbols and see if the dialog still hangs? This will help us narrow down if downloading symbols or generating the trace is what's hanging. Thanks.
Comment 6 Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2025-06-26 18:25:07 UTC
Absolutely, although it's obviously flaky type of problem, not preproducible, sometimes I have sth crashing 3 times per day sometimes not for two weeks, so as soon as something in KDE/Plasma crashes again I will give it a try without symbols!
Comment 7 Grzegorz Wierzowiecki 2025-06-26 20:22:02 UTC
Fortunate! I got another crash, and I unchecked this download box, and still "send button was gray"...

... because your request prompted me to go another mental path (i.e. by unchecking box), I come up with idea, ok, "maybe I will type something into text box" and Boom, send buttom appeared.

So actual bug is UI bug, when person is busy they see gray button, assume it does not work (as moment earlier plasma crashed they have other worries on their mind) and move on ... so maybe there should be "send" button available to click and when person clicks with empty box kindly as 'are you sure you don't want to provide any helpful context? it would highly help in debugging" or sth like that ... still allowing busy people to submit crash dupms even with empty messagges (as may help you with statistics or looking for correlations acorss dumps).

I hope I did not cause unnecessary debugging , still good we found root cause of the issue, thank you for working on this project!
Comment 8 TraceyC 2025-06-27 14:41:11 UTC
(In reply to Grzegorz Wierzowiecki from comment #7)
> So actual bug is UI bug, when person is busy they see gray button, assume it
> does not work (as moment earlier plasma crashed they have other worries on
> their mind) and move on ... so maybe there should be "send" button available
> to click and when person clicks with empty box kindly as 'are you sure you
> don't want to provide any helpful context? it would highly help in
> debugging" or sth like that ... still allowing busy people to submit crash
> dupms even with empty messagges (as may help you with statistics or looking
> for correlations acorss dumps).

Thanks for digging further. This is a valuable insight! I remember being caught out by that too, the first few times I saw a crash reporter window.

It sounds like the actionable thing for us it to make it more obvious that a message needs to be filled out to make the Send Message button active. Mandatory fields should indicate they are mandatory.

On various websites, for instance, I've seen red text below a mandatory text box saying something like
"Your message must be at least x characters to submit this form" 
And the text goes away when the requirement is met.
Comment 9 Bug Janitor Service 2025-11-06 11:58:12 UTC
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/drkonqi/-/merge_requests/361