Backtracing, Invalidated Bugs and Quality

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 15:26 +0200, Krzysztof Lichota wrote:
> 2008/8/20 Null Ack <nullack at gmail.com>:
> > I'm not convinced that the strategy of asking users to install
> > specialised debugging packages is the right way to go. I see a very
> > low hit rate with this working in practice.
> 
> It is not surprising. Asking people to install multi-megabyte packages
> and reproduce bug is not going to work as:
> 1) the bug often cannot be reproduced (and the user does not want to
> be hit by a bug again)
> 2) the user is requested an extra work he does not understand
> 3) some users do not have resources to install debug packages as they are huge
> 
> IMO the solution would be to create debugging symbols server.
> Microsoft had these for years. The information about debugging symbols
> is only needed on server, client only sends (in simplest version) MD5
> sum of library and address offset, which is transformed into the
> symbol by symbol server.

In what way is this different to the current Apport infrastructure?  My
understanding is that the client sends in the crashdump and the apport
retracers on launchpad replay it on a system with the debugging symbols
installed.

The retracable crashdumps are already nicely handled; how does the
symbols server help in cases when the retracers would fail?
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