errors.ubuntu.com and upgrade crashes

[Robert Park]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Bjoern Michaelsen
<bjoern.michaelsen at canonical.com> wrote:
>> > ... e.g. trivially: mark crashers 48hours after the upgrade
>> > as 'potentially an upgrade sideeffect' or somesuch?
>> Probably not retroactively. But I imagine it would be fairly easy to
>> add info to future error reports asking if do-release-upgrade (or
>> whatever) was running at the time.
>
> That would be very useful indeed. I assume the version data sent to
> errors.ubuntu.com in these cases to be wrong and poisoning the well anyway:
> - the client will send an error report with the application version the package
>   manager reports to be installed
> - the application crashed will actually be a older, different one.

This has bit me a couple of times, although I didn't understand what
was happening at the time.

I've seen certain python tracebacks in errors.ubuntu.com that, if you
check the version number specified in the crash, you find that the
code causing the traceback literally does not exist (in that version).
The only explanation is that the user was running an older copy, which
crashed, but the report contains the version number of the updated
package.

> It would be ideal to fingerprint the crashed binary and compare it to the
> version installed on disc, and skip reporting if those differ.

In the case of python programs you'd want to be sure to fingerprint
all the various .py files that might be loaded... probably better to
fingerprint every file in the package, if any differ then the report
is invalid.