I would also endorse the addition of a "packaging" component to bugzilla.  Packaging bugs are bugs and users can't at the outset be expected to know the difference, so it would be nice to not categorically send them away and hope they refile in the appropriate place (Launchpad etc).  It's somewhat nice to pass the buck onto distros that break things and close the bug as invalid, but at the end of the day they are our users too.

The other advantage, of course, is that keeping such bugs open might cut down on duplicates or encourage someone to become a distro packager (a lot of distro bugs I suspect happen because no one who knows better actually has full responsibility over the package).  It would also be easier for me to search and find them -- right now I have to hope someone subscribes me to a Wine bug caused by Ubuntu packaging before it gets closed.

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 11:41 AM, Sebastian Lackner <sebastian@fds-team.de> wrote:
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