ABRT?

[Richard Marko]

On 07/17/2014 03:10 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
>
> All of your points are valid. There's a trade-off here. I think the
> decision is very clear for just one reason: 90% of the time when I try
> to report a bug, ABRT works for 15-40 minutes then says the problem is
> unreportable. Subjecting users to that by default is not OK, even if it
> means the other 10% of quality bug reports don't come in.
>

It's not very clear as what you describe is the worst case scenario that
shouldn't happen often.

I agree that reporting process [1] is quite clumsy (and there are
reasons for that) but most users won't even get to the point of the
retracing process as their ureport is often matched with previous
reports and all they get is fast response from faf which contains link
to faf's report and link to bugzilla. This happens right after you click
Report and you're only subjected to the rest of the reporting torture
only in a case that your crash is unique.

As Jirka pointed out, retrace server is often overloaded to the point
that retracing of small coredump takes very long time. The machine where
it's hosted is also being upgraded so this shouldn't be an issue when
the upgrade is in place.

The real problem are the executables that generate unreportable
backtraces [2] as this leads to disappointment at the end of the
retracing process and this is what we are actually trying to resolve so
please file a bugzilla when this happens (ideally with a coredump attached).

The point, if it's ok to subject users to reporting was raised before
and addressed by our team by the configuration option called Shortened
reporting:

  Enables shortened GUI reporting where the reporting is interrupted
after AutoreportingEvent is done.
  Default value: Yes but only if application is running in GNOME desktop

So users who have enabled autoreporting [3] (ABRT asks for the first
time) are not subjected to the reporting process until they specifically
hit Report in gnome-abrt application.

Would it be better if we add a warning there that the reporting process
is only for advanced users and requires Bugzilla credentials?

Our plan was to have this configured during the installation process so
users can configure ABRT to their liking but this is not in place yet.


[1] http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/howitworks.html
[2]
http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#why-is-my-backtrace-unusable
[3]
http://abrt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/conf.html?highlight=short#desktop-session-autoreporting


Cheers,
Richard Marko