ABRT, Faf and current state of bug reporting

[Richard Marko]

Hi all,

I'll try to explain how crash reporting currently works in Fedora.

Typical reporting process looks like this:
 - crash is reported to Faf server which responds with 'known' or
'unknown' reply;
 - in case it responds with 'known' and the bug was already reported to
both the server and bugzilla, the reporting is stopped and only report
counts on the server are updated;
 - if the crash is unknown, the reporting either continues or stops
depending on the configuration (for Gnome, only automated reporting to
faf is enabled);
 - if enabled, the rest of the process continues with local or remote
retracing, reporting to bugzilla and attaching bugzilla ticket to faf
report.


This allows us to get accurate statistics of crashing applications while
not forcing every user to report to bugzilla. This is a trade-off
between getting accurate statistics and quality of the reports as
automated reports are anonymous which is also the reason why they can't
contain full backtrace with data.

Then there are reports with no bugzilla attached as they were reported
automatically or no one finished the bugzilla reporting. These reports
get bugzilla ticket attached after there's person who finishes the
reporting or the ticket is created by the server.

The intermediate part of the stack, faf server, is still pretty new so
please bear with us as we are dealing with lots of data. The goal of the
server is to provide accurate statistics of crashing applications and
clustering of the incoming reports.

Hope this helps to clarify the situation a bit. Feedback is always
welcome, especially if you are receiving bug reports you are not happy with.

Please use [1] for reporting issues if our mailing list [2] is not an
option for you.

[1] https://github.com/abrt/faf/issues/new
[2] crash-catcher at lists.fedorahosted.org


Best regards,

-- 
Richard Marko