ABRT, Faf and current state of bug reporting

[Alec Leamas]

On 2013-04-23 22:26, Rave it wrote:
>> From: Richard Marko <rmarko at redhat.com>
>> To: Development discussions related to Fedora
>> 	<devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
>> Subject: ABRT, Faf and current state of bug reporting
>> Message-ID: <51768C56.2080306 at redhat.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>>
>> 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,
>>
> I understand that it is important for fedora to have statistics about issues with packages.
> But why you expect from a package maintainer to fix an issue, which is the main goal of a bugreport, without a full backtraece and user interaction.
> If you can't support more info's for a maintainer, than creating a Faf bugzilla report is useless and for the records.
> And again, if you want to increase the quality of fedora bugzilla, then force the user to write a comment.
> I don't expect to read a book, but clicking on a button without having to be able to grasp the problem into words is to easy
>
> Wolfgang
+1

My first report was 12 crashes in /usr/local/bin/openerp i. e. in a 
non-packaged file. Still, it takes some time to sort this out which 
could be spent better.

--alec