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

[Ben Liblit <liblit cs berkeley edu>]

Elijah P Newren wrote:
> This sounds more like garnome ( garnome-list gnome org; see also
> www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome for a quick overview of what the garnome
> project is) than the gnome-bugsquad (garnome distributes many
> development versions of Gnome [as source; not as binaries], whereas the
> bugsquad is more involved in keeping bugzilla sane).

{nod}

I figured that <gnome-bugsquad> would also be a hangout for any GNOME QA 
people who might decide to take this on.  I really do want to find 
someone who is distributing binaries, simply because that makes the 
marketing problem easier on my part.  If everyone is compiling their 
own, I need to convince each person individually to download and use our 
instrumentor.  If binaries come from some central place, I just need to 
convince that one person (plus an explicit opt-in dialog for end users).

Perhaps I should produce my own set of instrumented GARNOME binaries for 
anyone to download and use.  Hmm....

> Out of curiosity, how long does it take to instrument code?  Is it a
> massive change, or is it more like electric fence, where merely linking
> the associated libraries can give you almost all the benefits?

Instrumentation is completely automatic, and takes place at compile 
time.  No source code changes are required.  You simply run our 
instrumentor instead of gcc.

Internally, the instrumentor works as a source-to-source transformation; 
the transformed source is then passed along to the native compiler. 
That's all taken care of behind the scenes: from the user's perspective, 
they are just using a different C compiler which produces instrumented 
code rather than regular code.

Thanks for the feedback, Elijah!