ABRT, Faf and current state of bug reporting

[Richard Marko]

On 04/23/2013 07:46 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:27:50 +0200
> Richard Marko <rmarko at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> 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;
> Does the user get a link to any bugs associated with the crash? 
> Or this happens without user interaction? 

He does. Both the link to faf and link to bugzilla (if ticket exists).

>
>>  - 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.
> Well, it's nice to know when things crash, sure... but without more
> information it's very difficult to figure out how to fix that crash. 
>
>> 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.
> Perhaps we could make it always require a person to be willing to
> file? Hopefully someone who can explain what happened and what they
> have installed, etc? ie, "hey, look, 50 people saw this crash, but it
> has no bug yet, well, I know exactly what I do to cause it, let me file
> the bug and help all 50 of the other folks seeing it out" 

Yes, this sounds good to me. I'll create tickets for this.

-- 
Richard Marko