Re: bug-buddy integration

[Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 7:28 PM, Brian Nitz <Brian Nitz sun com> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Am Mittwoch, den 11.03.2009, 23:28 +0100 schrieb Juan Jesús Ojeda
>>> Croissier:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Apport[1] is a system which is able to send a very complete crash log
>>>> to a bug tracker system (not necessary the Ubuntu's one). This is
>>>> working with the one from Ubuntu, but also Fedora and OpenSuse. Can be
>>>> used agoinst email based interface and more.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Fedora has Crash Catcher: https://fedorahosted.org/crash-catcher/wiki
>>>
>>> I always wonder if this isn't all about duplicating efforts.
>>>
>>
>> No need to wonder; it definitely is duplicated and wasted effort. Not
>> intentional, of course[1], but painful no matter how you slice it.
>>
>
> Do we have a list of features missing from bug buddy so maybe we could
> direct some of this energy towards making it (or some standard community
> crash logger)  meet community need and distro specific needs so we don't
> have every distro reinventing this wheel?
>
>  My own ideas are:

- has to work with non-GNOME apps.

>   - capture more complete distro and component revision information.

This is pretty complete in modern versions of bug-buddy, I believe.

>   - optionally passes bug first to a distribution maintained bug database.
> (to filter distro specific bug pollution)

This is the default behavior distros tend to want... which makes it
hard for upstream to do anything useful, since the distros are
historically pretty bad at getting this data upstream. (By 'pretty
bad' I don't think any distro which does this has ever
systematically/programatically moved that data upstream, though I'm
certainly out of touch and may have missed something.)

Mind you, it isn't clear to me that upstream has been doing much
useful with the data we do have of late, but like the uncoordinated
re-inventions of bug-buddy, that is a symptom of the general
underinvestment in QA by GNOME partners.

>   - callable by user from application (window manager?) menu, captures user
> comments as well as application context info.
>   - plug-ins for distro specific capture tools (strace, ktrace, truss,
> dtrace, mdb, pstack, gdb, dbx,...)

I'd note that this data is actually overrated. Useful, yes, but even
the primitive information we used to get was very useful when we got
it in volume and we had eyes poring over it for clues. I have a sense
that the current emphasis on all these various tools (with their
attendant complexities) makes perfect data collection the enemy of
good data collection.

Luis