A thought on abrt

[Rick Stevens]

On 01/22/2010 12:25 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I'm just filing my 3rd or 4th abrt report in as many days (for different
> apps), and every time the tool downloads a whole bunch of debuginfo
> packages so it can resolve symbols in coredumps. This makes perfect
> sense, except that the people who will eventually look at the bug report
> have just as much access to debuginfo packages as I do, and probably a
> heck of a lot more bandwidth.
>
> Given that abrt is designed to make bug-reporting easier for the average
> user, I suspect a lot of b/w is being consumed by these downloads that
> would not otherwise be the case. Would it not be an idea to rethink how
> this is handled? By definition abrt already knows exactly which packages
> are involved in the problem, so it could simply report what they are and
> add the coredumps/logs/whatever.

Ah, but which version of the program were you running when abrt kicked
in?  To diagnose a failure, the maintainers need as much info as then
can get about the specifics of the program that failed (what files had
been loaded, where the program pooped, what was the status of the stack, 
lots of things).

Ideally, yes, abrt could report the version of the program and make the
maintainers go and get the debug info, but there would be big holes in
their visibility as to what made YOUR instance crap out.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks at nerd.com -
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