Triaging xine-lib bugs

[Reinhard Tartler]

In order to deal with the bugs in the xine-lib package, I did write some
guidelines how to triage the crashers bug in a wiki page. I would really
appreciate if the bugsquad people could look at these notes, clean it up
and properly integrate them with the official debugging procedures.

Please note that it is xine-lib specific, I think the instruction could
be worded in a more general way, so that it applies to our other media
packages, including mplayer, vlc, ffmpeg and nearly anything that
uses ffmpeg to play a movie.

Source can be found
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/DebuggingXineLib, included
inline here for easy commenting (sorry for the long lines):

= Dealing with Xine-Lib Bugs =

Currently on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xine-lib/+bugs, many of the bugs are actually crasher bugs, that are pretty difficult to deal with. In order to be able to deal with them, we need pretty precise information on the cause of the bug.

In previous ubuntu releases, we have been providing debug symbols only using ddebs. These ddebs are not availble in PPA archives, so that we cannot produce the same meaningful backtraces with backported test packages. In order to fix that, the packages in intrepid (and its backports) provide debug symbols themselves.

= How can triagers help =

Dear triagers, if you notice a crasher bug, please make sure that the bug is complete. Please set the bug to incomplete until the following pieces of information are provided:

  * example file that causes the crash
  * exact versions used
  * a backtrace using the latest packages from the motumedia PPA.

= Stock Response for xine-lib bugs =

Thanks for taking your time to report this bug. You have reported a crash in the xine-lib library. In order to be able to actually fix this bug, we must be able to

  * reproduce it
  * check if it happens with the latest version 
  * understand where it actually crashes

You can help with the first point by attaching an example file to this bug report. Please note that a proper attachment is preferred over a link to some remote site. Remote side that are password protected or otherwise restriced (like services like rapidshare.com and similar) are absolutely not acceptable.

For the 2nd point, the MOTUMedia team provide updated packages for xine-lib and ffmpeg in their PPA for past ubuntu releases. See http://launchpad.net/~motumedia/+archive for instructions how to enable that archive. Please add this repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list, update your system and make sure, that you have both packages 'ffmpeg-dbg' and 'libxine1-dbg' installed (use 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get install libxine1-dbg ffmpeg-dbg'). This way, you can produce meaningful backtraces that help us with point 3. You can read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace about how to create proper backtraces that help developers identifying the exact location of the crash.

Thank you for your cooperation.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4