Dealing with crash reports

[Martin Pitt]

Hi David,

cc'ing ubuntu-devel-discuss.

David Farning [2007-02-10  0:20 -0600]:
> > Which flash package do you have installed?
> > Which Java package do you have installed?
> > Which firefox extensions do you have installed?"

I think apport can help here. We should add a firefox apport hook which
includes this information in the initial report. See
/usr/share/doc/apport/package-hooks.txt. You probably know better than
me how to figure out these numbers, but please give me a ping in IRC,
then we can work on this together.

> From a thread on dev-discuss I understand that pitti is working on
> setting up a service that will allow LP to symbolize the reports.

Right, but so far this has been a hobby project, since most of my time
is taken by other allocated stuff.

> In the mean time what should we do?
> 1 Continue the request that user symbolize the reports.
>   pros
>     a few would be done
>   con
>     time and bandwidth intensive for users.
>     to be useful -dbg _must_ be installed for all packages touched in the stack just firefox... retrace -d is better here.

Hm, but for genuine Firefox crashes, firefox-dbg should usually
suffice, doesn't it?

> 2 Symbolize the reports ourselves.
> 3 Set unsymbolized reports as dupes of a master crash

These three approaches do not conflict with each other, so all of them
are doable.

> 4  Delete unsymbolized reports after a period of time

Doesn't work in Malone at least at the moment. Rejecting the bug is
the closest approximation we have for now.

> Martin, do you have an estimate on when the LP service will be in place. 

Since it is not a disto change, but infrastructure, it is not bound by
feature freeze. I figure it'll take me about 15 additional work hours
to get this going, plus some assistance from the admins. The latter
should be relatively easy now, since my current approach does not need
any root privileges any more (and thus no complicated virtualization
setup).

> Would it be worth it too add an option to have apport run -retrace
> before uploading the crash report.  I understand you are already
> being flamed about apport being too slow;(

It is possible to add a UI option to run this right when the crash
happens. In fact, we could display it if the user has ddebs actually
available (i. e. set up in his apt sources.list and apt-get update'd).
Thus we would not make the default UI more complicated, but it might
be more useful for users who know what's going on and were told to add
this ddeb package repository. Thoughts?

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt              http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian Developer        http://www.debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20070212/b92bb805/attachment.sig>