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

[Ben Liblit <liblit cs berkeley edu>]

A joint reply to Andrew Sobala, Havoc Pennington, and Gregory Leblanc:

Each of you has made the point that the GARNOME and JHBuild scripts are 
near-ubiquitous points of entry for people building their own prerelease 
GNOME binaries.  I agree that hooking into these build systems would be 
a good way to get widespread deployment, provided that our instrumentor 
is itself packaged up and widely available.

(An unfortunate consideration is that the core of our instrumentor is 
written in OCaml, using the CIL analysis infrastructure 
<http://manju.cs.berkeley.edu/cil/>.  That will be an additional hurdle 
to adoption if folks intend to download and build the instrumentor 
itself from sources.  Joe random user is rather less likely to have an 
OCaml compiler on his box than, say, gcc.)

I've gotten expressions of interest from at least one end-user 
application developer.  I think I'll start with end-user apps first, 
since they are in some ways a simpler scenario.  Once we've gotten a bit 
more field testing and have a good report collection infrastructure in 
place, then we can take a second look at GARNOME or JHBuild integration 
for broader instrumentation sampling across the entire desktop.

Thanks for the feedback, guys!