Firefox and Apport in Ubuntu

[Chris Coulson]

Hi,

Starting in Maverick, we have blacklisted Firefox in Apport and switched
on the upstream crash reporter. This means that we should no longer be
receiving crash reports for Firefox in Launchpad, but users will be
submitting them upstream instead.

So, why have we made this change?

Previously, Mozilla have had quite poor visibility of crashes on Linux,
primarily because most users run the Firefox version provided by their
distribution rather than the builds provided from Mozilla. Information
from crash reports is an important part of their QA process to ensure
they can deliver high quality updates, and catch regressions early.

In addition to this, crash reports have generally piled up on Launchpad
over time, and we don't have the manpower required to forward these
reports to where they will be most useful (ie, to Mozilla). Crash
reports forwarded to their Bugzilla are generally less useful anyway, as
it is more difficult to spot patterns or common issues across crash
reports.

So, how does this affect you?

Traditionally, if a user reported a bug in Launchpad saying that Firefox
is crashing, but without using Apport or providing a useful backtrace,
one of the following would happen:

1) The report would be closed and the reporter asked to submit a new
report using Apport.
2) The reporter would be asked for a backtrace.

Starting in Maverick (and also in Lucid when Firefox 3.6.9 is released
later this month), bug triagers should follow the following process when
somebody reports that Firefox is crashing:

1) Ask the reporter to submit their crash report directly to Mozilla
using the upstream crash reporter.
2) Ask the reporter to provide the crash ID from their crash report
(available in about:crashes). The crash ID will resolve to something
like this:
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/bp-ae5a1427-d9f6-4966-bc7e-1dd4a2100831

If it is obvious from the backtrace that the crash is an upstream
problem, then the Launchpad bug can be closed. However, please don't do
this unless you are absolutely sure of this (If in doubt, please ask
Micah Gersten or myself).

If the backtrace indicates that the problem might be with one of our
platform libraries, then please ask the reporter to provide a new
backtrace in the usual way (a new backtrace is required here because the
Mozilla server doesn't have access to the symbols required to properly
resolve issues outside of Mozilla code).

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Thanks
Chris

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-bugsquad/attachments/20100903/d5c5401a/attachment.pgp