bug reporting and file descriptors...

[Bruno Girin]

On Thu, 2010-07-22 at 21:22 +0200, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 14:10:23 (CEST), Martin Pitt wrote:
> 
> > Reinhard Tartler [2010-07-22 13:00 +0200]:
> >> > 7 -> /home/daniel/test.mp3
> >> >
> >> > Would it make sense to have this information, or have I overlooked something?
> >> 
> >> I think it would be incredibly helpful.
> >
> > Note that we got quite a lot of complaints when hooks exposed
> > arbitrary paths to files or even directories, due to privacy reasons.
> > If we are going to do this, we need to do some anonymization there.
> 
> In this case, I think we can:
> 
>  - interactively ask the user if he/she is OK with that

That's always good :-)

>  - only attach the first few megabytes of the file

Not sure about that: if the file is a binary file, like the mp3 above,
you will need to attach all or none of it as a partial file is not much
use. If it is a text file, the interesting bit may be at the end
(especially in the case of a log file). You would also need a blacklist
for some files so that they are never uploaded (such as /etc/shadow).

>  - randomize the filename

You could use the name of the soft link, which is a sequence number and
keep the extension, e.g. 7.mp3 (or fd7.mp3) for the mp3 file above. It
may also be good to selectively randomize, e.g. only randomize what's
under /home, the reason being that knowing that one of the files
descriptors points to a well known file (like anything in /etc) may help
analyse the cause of the bug. Having said that, knowing that one of the
file descriptors points to /home/user/.gvfs/something-or-other may be
useful too. Maybe replace /home/user with ~?

Bruno