A thought on abrt
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.
poc
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5 comments
Re: A thought on abrt
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.
Re: A thought on abrt
That's all in the coredump, which as I said would still be added to the
report. If abrt knows enough to download debuginfo packages, it follows
that it knows enough to give a list of what's needed without having to
download them.
Apart from the coredump, logs and my description of what happened, there
is absolutely nothing that I can send them that they can't in principle
get for themselves.
poc
Re: A thought on abrt
holes in their visibility as to what made YOUR instance crap out.
This already came up a while back - the concern as I recall was
coredumps may contain private data - the traceback you can read and
check .. the coredump you cant (easily).
Re: A thought on abrt
Abrt already asks if you want to send the dump, and warns you that it
may contain private data. I'm not proposing any change to this, or to
any other aspect of abrt except that of downloading debuginfo packages.
poc
Re: A thought on abrt
The 95% answer to that is that you don't send a coredump of your initial
fault. You try to get the computer to fail again, and if you can,
you've got a repeatable fault.
If you can get it to fault from a cold boot, then hopefully you're only
testing the things that are faulty, and not including anything personal
(since your cold boot test would be just with the fault, and not while
you're downloading your mail and doing your internet banking in the
background, as well).