Re: Logging user actions, updated

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 10:40 -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 15:00 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 
> > I commited this to head (which is 2.17 now), as it seems useful. Has it
> > worked out for you with debugging customer problems?
> 
> Sweet, thanks for committing it [I added nautilus-debug-log.[ch] which
> were not on CVS, BTW].

Oops...

> So far, the logging has been useful for two things:
> 
> 1. Figure out that something was weird in the views, which led me to
> look at HEAD for your ref-the-file-list patches.
> 
> 2. Figure out that we had a bunch of roundtrips to gnome-vfs-daemon.
> But you had fixed this first, too!
> 
> So the general strategy is to add more logging code, and then wait for
> Alex to preemptively fix the stuff which I was looking for.

I just wish that strategy worked for me too. :)

> > Some comments:
> > What is "is_milestone" used for. It seems like we always ignore anything
> > that doesn't set that.
> 
> I've started using it now.  The idea is that you don't want certain
> things to be purged from the ring buffer:  logs from initialization
> ("did we discover the right drives/volumes?"), major errors (GLog
> warnings and criticals), and other things which you really need to know
> about.

Ah, ok.

> The attached patch (on CVS now) lets you create a
> ~/nautilus-debug-log.conf (it's a GKeyFile) to configure what domains
> get logged and the size of the ring buffer.  The default is to log only
> "USER" messages now.

Shouldn't that be ~/.nautilus-debug-log.conf? (i.e. hidden)

> One thing I'd really like, but have no idea how to do it, is to dump the
> bug-buddy stack traces directly in the debug log.  Right now asking
> users to "please send me the stack trace, ~/nautilus-debug-log.txt and
> ~/.xsession-errors" is quite cumbersome :)

I recently wrote a patch for bug-buddy that adds the last 15 lines
of .xsession-errors into the bugreport. That is quite useful, as you see
all the g_errors/g_warnings, etc that happened before the crash. 

Maybe we can add some sort of per-module script to add more bug-buddy
info, say by specifying something in the desktop file.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a suave guitar-strumming jungle king who must take medication to keep him 
sane. She's an orphaned African-American snake charmer who believes she is the 
reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen. They fight crime!