Richard Hughes ([info]hughsient) wrote,
@ 2007-03-06 10:13:00
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Handling GNOME Bugs
The new GNOME crash handler is great. Unfortunately I get quite a few duplicates every day of a particular bug that has recently been fixed. I'm sure I'm not the only developer with this problem of fighting with bugzilla.

Perhaps the wording of the crash dialog should say:

What were you doing when the application crashed?
You should aim to provide developers with enough information to replicate the crash, and not details about what you are drinking.
Please can you check the product bugzilla page to check for duplicates before sending crash details. [Check Now]

Or, even better:
A similar bug has already been reported and the developers have released a fix. Please make sure your system is up to date, and if so file this in your distribution bug tracker.

Or at least:
The application crashed and you have no debugging symbols; this bug report is both a waste of time for you and the application developer who will just ask for a better stacktrace with debugging symbols.

Or in an ideal world:
The application crashed and you have no debugging information available. The required files have now been automatically downloaded, and if the bug happens again your bug report will be sent to developers.

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Ideal world
(Anonymous)
2007-03-06 10:47 am UTC (link)
Actually, in an ideal world, it would be:
The application crashed and you have no debugging information available. The required files have now been automatically downloaded, and I can now put up a useful stacktrace to send this report to the developers. Now, I see from the stacktrace that a similar bug has already been reported and the developers have released a fix. Please make sure your system is up to date, and if so file this in your distribution bug tracker.

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Re: Ideal world
(Anonymous)
2007-03-06 11:45 am UTC (link)
Even better:
The application had crashed and you have no debugging information available. Required files have been automatically downloaded and a useful stacktrace bave been sent to the developer. Now, I see from the stacktrace that a similar bug have been reported and a fix has been released. Your system is currently being updated.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Re: Ideal world
[info]bookeldor
2007-03-06 02:37 pm UTC (link)
Even better: The application does not crash.
Don't you think the question "what were you doing" is just not precise enough, so people don't know what to answer :) ?

(Reply to this) (Parent)
Re: Ideal world
[info]marnanel
2007-03-08 03:09 am UTC (link)
Even better, everyone would ship binaries with debug symbols.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]ajaxxx
2007-03-06 02:46 pm UTC (link)
In the ideal world, your users will never touch debuginfo packages. They are far too large, no one has the bandwidth for it, and the crash dialog already takes too long to show up.

Instead, the crash handler will send a minidump out, along with the NEVR of each package that has a file listed in the backtrace. Then, on some high speed network with a metric assload of diskspace and every debuginfo package you could possibly want, a daemon process will construct the moral equivalent of a debug chroot. Between that and the minidump the daemon will have enough information to reconstruct what went wrong at runtime.

The debug server handles incident reports in a separate namespace from bugzilla, and developers (or their scripts) will walk over it and escalate common patterns to bugzilla. Bugzilla gets extended to have a structured data field for "fixed in this version", and when a bug is closed with that data, any attached debug incidents get notifies. (Other events too, the UI suggests itself really.) The debug service is also polyinstantiated among the major distros, so that the update emails can include things like the EVR of the package that includes the fix, and possibly integrate with the distro's update tool of choice.

Thus the UI is something like "The app crashed. If you want to report this bug, enter the email address that you would like to use to receive updates about this bug's status."

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What should we do?
(Anonymous)
2007-03-06 06:08 pm UTC (link)
As a user who would like to contribute by testing and reporting bugs, and as a developer who understands the uselessness of stack traces with no debugging symbols, how exactly do I go about installing support for debugging symbols to show up in my standard install of Ubuntu? I have plenty of extra space on my computer so the size of the packages doesn't matter to me.

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Re: What should we do?
(Anonymous)
2007-03-07 12:02 am UTC (link)
As the canned reply on bugzilla reads...

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug.
Unfortunately, that stack trace is missing some elements that will help a lot to solve the problem, so it will be hard for the developers to fix that crash. Can you get us a stack trace with debugging symbols? Please see http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces for more information on how to do so. Thanks in advance!

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