Handling crash reports

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 04:29:03PM -0600, David Farning wrote:
> This is follow up to the changing nature of bug reports from a few weeks
> ago.
> 
> On the Mozillateam our triagers are getting swamped with automatic crash
> reports.
> 
> I would like to make a few suggestions that would greatly help our
> efforts and hopefully others developers too.
> 
> 1.  Add a top level boolean that categorizes issue reports as crashes.
> This will greatly aid the sorting of bugs for different types of
> triagers.

If your intention is to suggest this as an improvement to Launchpad, then
you should send it to the launchpad-users list (the Launchpad developers
don't read ubuntu-devel-discuss).

> 2.  Automate the process for apport to upload crash report data.  Many
> of our issue are reports of crashes without the crash data.

This is now implemented in Feisty, as we had been working along these lines
for some time now.

> 3.  Automate the process of symbolizing crash reports.  The process of
> downloading the crash report, running apport-retrace, and re-uploading
> the now symbolized crash report is very slow for all but the fastest
> network connections.

This has, of course, been our intention from the start, which is why you see
that all of the pieces for it already exist but need some work to be glued
together.  Unfortunately, this gluing is sometimes the hard part.

Newer versions of apport in Feisty provide a more standardized summary for
the bug, which should help in culling duplicates.

If the reports are only useful with debug symbols, then apport could check
whether firefox-dbg is installed, and guide the user to install it in order
to submit the report.  The new apport hook infrastructure might be
sufficient for the task.

-- 
 - mdz