ABRT?

[Kalev Lember]

On 07/14/2014 03:45 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Next question: does ABRT work for you? Everything I've reported in the
> past month or so ended in an Emergency Analysis (the whole ABRT
> processing directory gets uploaded to the server, since there was an
> ABRT bug). Before that, I timed how long it took to report crashes: I
> believe I clocked a gnote crash at just under 15 minutes, a WebKit crash
> at about 40. (I'm positive I reported a bug about this, but I can't find
> it anymore.) This is so far beyond what I personally think is OK that
> I'd rather Workstation to have no ABRT at all, but I don't know if my
> experiences are typical. If others are experiencing the same, we should
> probably discuss where to draw the line and then get in touch with the
> ABRT devs.
> 
> (It's not that I don't want a crash catcher, just that its benefits need
> to be balanced against the user experience. I think ABRT makes Fedora
> look bad.)

My own experience with ABRT is mixed.

As a developer, I absolutely love the retrace server,
https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/problems/hot/ . It gives an
overview of the most frequent traces ABRT has seen and this is
invaluable for prioritizing and fixing crashers that users are
experiencing in real world. Also, bug reports filed with ABRT tend to be
of high quality, which makes it easy to fix issues reported. I always
tell everybody to submit crash reports when ABRT asks them to, since it
helps us fix stuff.

As a user, I hate ABRT with all my heart. The UI is confusing to me, it
just never seems to work properly (perhaps that's because I run rawhide
and ABRT developers don't focus their efforts there), and it also gets
in the way of debugging crashes in my own stuff. So I tend to remove
it from my systems and file bugs by hand instead, if needed.


-- 
Kalev