ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Pope <alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ted,

On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 9:58 PM, Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sat, 2014-06-07 at 15:57 +0100, Alan Pope wrote:
>
> Unfortunately I get a bunch of crash files in /var/crash, and need to
> do some correlation to figure out which app crashed it. I'll modify my
> script to look for files in /var/crash after every application
> start/stop cycle and pause so I can analyse it.
>
> e.g. these guys, no idea what triggered them without some effort.
>
>
> Frankly, I don't think you should have to analyze them, though that'd be
> nice. A lot of time stacktraces are self explanatory in that regard.
> Uploading is more important that analyzing.
>

I modified the script so it pauses whenever I get a crash and that was
great for identifying which apps cause or show up platform issues. In
fact we've had two updates in the store as a direct result me
identifying them with this script, so there's a net benefit right
there. Eventually all of the analysis finished and with 326 apps I had
7 bugs filed, so it's all good.

> For me personally I just want you to run:
>
> /usr/share/apport/whoopsie-upload-all
>

I figure that's useful in the case where I have multiple .crash files
which need uploading, which is fine. In my case I paused the script
each time I found a .crash and manually filed a bug *and* ran
apport-cli <crashfile> which I believe is effectively the same as your
whoopsie-upload-all but for one file. I appreciate the input though
Ted, I'll probably let it run to the end and then upload-all at the
end.

> That'll collect the additional apport data and put them into errors for
> grouping. I imagine that most devs are checking errors for stack traces of
> their packages already, and that way we can see if they happen on specific
> devices/architectures/etc.
>

I wasn't sure if devs actually look at the uploaded crash reports. Is
your imagination matched with reality? Can I expect that developers of
foo will look for crashdumps for foo? Is that reasonable? (I feel
there's a common {mis}conception that crashdumps disappear into the
aether and are never looked at, which would be good to dispel).

> There's currently no tool to add a custom field on the crash reports like
> "AlanTesting: Staring app" or similar. But I it shouldn't be too hard to add
> at the top of the crash files with a small script. Then we should be able to
> search for them by that key I believe (cc'd Evan to check that)
>

I'm not looking for special treatment, I'm just interested in making
sure developers look at the crash reports, whoever files them.

Cheers,
-- 
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://ubuntu.com/