ABRT frustrating for users and developers

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dimanche 17 janvier 2010 à 12:53 +0100, Michael Schwendt a écrit :
> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:36:03 +0100, Nicolas wrote:
> 
> > Le samedi 16 janvier 2010 à 15:09 -0500, Tom Lane a écrit :
> > >  Users have to provide information
> > > about what they were doing, copies of input files, etc etc just
> the
> > > same as in a manually-initiated bug report. 
> > 
> > IMHO the big plus of abrt is it triggers even when the user is not
> > giving his full attention to the app and not checking what it does
> > exactly when it crashes (typical example is multitasking and doing
> stuff
> > in 3-4 apps when one dies). There is a huge class of crashes that
> were
> > not reported before because the user had no idea what the app was
> doing
> > exactly when it crashed and could not reproduce it with debuginfo
> later.
> 
> A downside is that ABRT is triggered for all sorts of weird
> memory/heap
> corruption that isn't reproducible. Stability problems with RAM chips
> are widespread.
> 
> A bugzilla stock response that points at "memtester" and "memtest86+"
> will likely be needed more often.

That seems totally unecessary and counter-productive to me. You can
distinguish between local memory problems and actual hard-to-trigger
bugs without bothering users by checking if the trace is reported by
abrt for other systems.

I know it's very human to shoot the messenger but packagers &
developpers should resist the urge to make tester life miserable to
punish them from reporting inconvenient problems.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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