ABRT unusable again

[Karel Klic]

Christoph Wickert wrote:
> What's wrong with ABRT? ALl the backtraces I get are unusable again. If
> Thunar crashes, not even Thunar-debuginfo gets installed.

There is a flaw in ABRT 1.0.4, which allows to submit incomplete 
backtraces. It got into the source code during the GUI rewrite.

There is abrt-1.0.6 in Fedora 12 testing repository, which contains a 
fix for this issue.

> abrt 1.0 worked here, then came 1.0.2 which was broken. 1.0.3 was
> working again, but got superseded be 1.0.4 only a few of days later.
> This means that most of the time, all the bugs submitted are basically
> useless.

It became better with later releases, but the bug you described made it 
bad again (for this release).

As far as I can tell, the last large-scale change (the new GUI) was 
finished in 1.0.4. It introduced some bugs, but those are fixed now.
A lot of people complained about the old GUI, so it seemed to us (the 
ABRT team) that the GUI overhaul was mandatory. Well, some people 
complain about the current GUI, but IMHO its better.

The latest version (1.0.6) contains mostly bug fixes, so it should not 
break things, it should make ABRT reports sane again.

> For me as the maintainer it is a lot of work to reply to all these
> useless reports and for our users it's just frustrating if all their
> reports get closed INSUFFICIENT_DATA.

IMHO it's not so frustrating for users, as it is frustrating for some 
maintainers. Users want to help by reporting crashes, but it doesn't 
make you sad when the crash you just reported was not useful at the end 
(you invested a few clicks in reporting that crash).

ABRT hurt some maintainers in Fedora 12. I believe the following Fedora 
releases will benefit from ABRT, as the crashes in the bleeding edge 
software introduced in every release will be quickly detected and fixed.

I am now going to write a script which detects all the backtraces 
without debuginfo in Bugzilla, and closes the bugs as INSUFFICIENT_DATA 
with an apology. I do not know how many of them are in Bugzilla, but 
those can be detected and closed automatically (more info soon, it 
should be hacked together quickly).

> If the situation doesn't change any time soon, we IMHO should consider
> disabling abrt until the issues are fixed.

Please consider testing and adding +1 karma to ABRT 1.0.6 in Bodhi.

Also a script [1] which finds all the duplicate backtraces (we can find) 
in Bugzilla has been written. Those duplicates were made by older ABRT 
versions without good duplicate detection. ~900 bugs can be closed with 
this script. Hopefully it removes some burden from package maintainers.

[1] https://fedorahosted.org/abrt/browser/src/Backtrace/abrt-bz-dupchecker

Best Regards,
Karel