ABRT?

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hey Richard,

On Wed, 2014-07-23 at 16:15 +0200, Richard Marko wrote:
> 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.

In practice my experience has been that ABRT is rarely able to
automatically match my crash with an existing Bugzilla report, so that
the user doesn't need to go through the Bugzilla report process if he
wants to make sure the bug makes it to Bugzilla. This is wonderful when
it does work, though.

The clumsy reporting process is something that should be improved, but I
don't think it's a super serious problem that should preclude the
inclusion of gnome-abrt in Fedora Workstation. I think the two remaining
serious problems are speed and unusable backtraces.

> 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.

OK, that's wonderful news. Do you have any estimate on when the upgrade
will occur? Is it possible that a cluster of servers may be needed to
spread the workload?

> 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).

Unfortunately this is still the most common outcome for me, so much so
that I've usually stopped trying to report crashes to Bugzilla. I've
filed a couple Bugzilla tickets for this in the past, [1] and [2].

I, personally, think the unreportable backtrace and the speed problems
should be the only remaining blockers here.

> 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.

Yes, I think this is already a good default.

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

I don't think the reporting process is so complicated that we need to
restrict it to advanced users only. (If that were the case, I would
question whether we want to install an app by default that exists only
for use by advanced users.) The speed and reliability issues are
problems for both advanced users and nontechnical users.

There should indeed be a friendly dialog to help you configure your Red
Hat Bugzilla credentials on first use, though. I seem to recall that
ABRT does not currently handle a lack of Bugzilla credentials very
gracefully.

Thanks and Happy Wednesday,

Michael

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1047556
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1055627
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