ABRT frustrating for users and developers

Camilo Mesias camilo at mesias.co.uk
Sun Jan 17 13:02:22 UTC 2010


Can we draw any parallels from work in the commercial world? (I was
going to use the word 'professional' but don't want to disparage open
source work... it's just a different ecosystem)

So at work we have to produce a software product.
We test the product to the best of our ability / to test plans /
regression tests.
We make an internal release and it's tested further.
We release to customers and they do their own testing.
Customers roll out the release for general use.

At any point in the testing, defects are found and reported. These can
inherently be more or less useful depending on the complexity of the
fault, the level of detail, correctness, etc. BUT if there is a core
file then it's always more useful than a report with no core file.

Having said that the things that can be done with a mere backtrace are
limited. I would almost always need to look at the corefile too, and
would be frustrated if it wasn't available. Perhaps the workflow that
starts with ABRT providing a backtrace needs to be significantly
different to the workflow for a manually submitted bug. More automated
perhaps?

What if every component had a placeholder bug for undiagnosed ABRT
info. Keeping all of them together would help to gauge which are
significant and which are one-in-a-million cosmic rays flipping RAM
bits etc.


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