Introducing automatic crash reporting in Edgy

[Jerry Haltom]

I am curious, with regard to these debug symbols, if it would be
possible to remove their need.

bug-buddy and related crash reporting applications could be made to
submit a core file. This core file, when combined with the -dbg package
*by a developer* would result in the proper stack track. Seeing as all
of the packages a user should be using in a release distro are fairly
static, this probably isn't that big of a deal. For edgy, the packages
are available or findable.

There could even be a launchpad service of some sort of some sort to
take core files from bug reports and upload a stack trace automatically.
(install exact versions into chroot, use to extract stack trace, etc).

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 10:03 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> Great news!
> 
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 09:26:31AM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> > Debug symbols
> > -------------
> > In general, the backtraces in the generated reports will not have
> > debug symbols. There is another specification [4] which, when fully
> > implemented, will provide the debug symbols for all packages on a
> > publicly accessible place in the form of 'ddebs (debug .deb packages).
> > Until Launchpad supports them natively, we will soon have an
> > intermediate solution for publishing them (they are already generated
> > on the buildds, but currently thrown away).
> > 
> > However, many packages already have a -dbg package, and you can also
> > rebuild a package locally with 'pkg-create-dbgsym' installed to get
> > the .ddebs.
> 
> Surely the debug symbols need to match the exact program and libraries used
> on the system where crash occurred, no?  Does apport verify this?  Even a
> rebuild could easily change offsets in the program.  This is why we need to
> save the information during the build.
> 
> >  * If you configured your browser to open new pages in new tabs
> >    instead of new windows, and you already have an open browser window
> >    on a different virtual workspace, then you will not see anything
> >    happen when the bug reporting dialog opens and asks to file a bug.
> >    I do not see an easy solution for this which does not override the
> >    Gnome configuration. Suggestions welcome.
> 
> Those of us who choose this (optional, non-default) configuration are
> accustomed to this kind of behaviour, and accept it as a tradeoff for
> keeping our browser organized.
> 
> Probably the best we could do would be to have Firefox use the same GNOME
> facility used to notify the user of activity in xchat-gnome, gaim, etc. so
> that the task bar flashes.
> 
> -- 
>  - mdz
>