Re: call for collaborators: bug isolation via remote program sampling

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Fri, 2003-04-25 at 22:58, Ben Liblit wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > The main challenge I see is that GNOME distributes betas as source
> > only.
> 
> Good point, though one does commonly see beta binaries for various 
> GNOME-based applications.  Perhaps I should be targeting these end user 
> applications rather than the core desktop per se.
> 
> > So I believe we'd need some way to let people build their own
> > instrumented code.
> 
> That could certainly be done, with a little work on my end to get our 
> instrumentation infrastructure packaged up nicely.  There's still the 
> question of how to get people to use it, though.  If each person builds 
> their own, I've got quite a marketing challenge to convince each of 
> those people to download and use our instrumentor.  With precompiled 
> binaries, I only need to convince one person to use our system (plus an 
> explicit opt-in dialog for end users).
> 

People using bleeding edge gnome use one of a very few build scripts,
since building everything by hand is a nightmare.

Look at garnome and jhbuild (cvs module jhbuild;
developer.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html) for the most common ways people use
to build release versions and cvs versions respectively.

Ultimately, your compile stuff needs to be packaged with one of these
for people to use it.

> > We do have the automated bug report tool bug-buddy that already
> > uploads backtraces, so perhaps that could be extended to also upload
> > the instrumentation data?
> 
> Our analysis works by identifying behavioral differences between 
> successful and failed runs.  Right now, that means it needs both crash 
> reports as well as non-crash reports.  Eventually we may get to the 
> point where we can use crash reports only, but for now, we need both. 
> Bug-buddy would only cover the crashing half of the picture.
> 
> (This is part of the reason I intend the opt-in to be *very* explicit. 
> People are used to reporting crashes.  Reporting non-crashes is unusual, 
> so I want to make sure that each user clearly knows what's going on.)
> 

Yeah. jhbuild has an rc file to set options, so that's easy :-)

> Thanks for the feedback, Havoc!  This is all good food for thought.

-- 
Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>

"A freudian slip is when you say one thing but you mean your mother." -- unknown