Dealing with crash reports

[David Farning]

How to deal with those darn crash reports?

I've included pitti, the apport dev, and slaw the bug dude in this
conversation for their input.

Current status:
The mozillateam is receiving unsymbolizied crash reports at a rate of
>10 per day.

In the unsymbolizied state the reports or not useful because of the lack
of symbolized stacktrace. Issues title such as Random crash don't help.

We are responding to crash reports as follows



"Thank you for the bug report. Could you please install firefox-dbg
(these are the firefox debugging symbols) and try to obtain a backtrace
(or crash report) by following the instructions on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs 
This will greatly aid us in tracking down your problem.

It is of particular interest that you run apport-retrace -d against your crash report before uploading.

Which flash package do you have installed?
Which Java package do you have installed?
Which firefox extensions do you have installed?"




This is less than optimal because it is too difficult for a new user to perform and require re-uploading the report.
We are getting a return <5% on these requests while anoying our users.

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.

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.

2 Symbolize the reports ourselves.
  pros
    the job would get done...kind of
  cons
    very bandwidth and time intensive for triager.
    -retrace -d must be run on a system with the same package versions as the reporter or you get version mismatch errors.
 
3 Set unsymbolized reports as dupes of a master crash
  pros 
    cleans up the bug list until we have the proper tools to deal with
them
  cons
    vile hack

4  Delete unsymbolized reports after a period of time
  pros 
    cleans up the bug list
  cons
    really vile hack

Alexander, how much time will you be having to work on this issue over
the next few weeks?  Is your focus going to be on cleaning up the
variose packages?


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


Thanks
-- 
David Farning <dfarning at gmail.com>
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