ABRT for f12 status

Colin Walters walters at verbum.org
Fri Aug 28 21:31:41 UTC 2009


Hi internets,

I was looking at the current state of ABRT (I tested on F11).  The
core capturing seems to work well.  In brief, I propose to apply the
(attached) patch to comps-f12.xml.in.

For upgrades, we'll need to add a Conflicts: bug-buddy, correct?

ABRT is a big step forward from bug-buddy in that the crashes are
stored sanely in a persistent manner, and it captures crashes in the
core OS as well.

Concerns:

== Getting the Data ==
My main concern is ensuring that we get the data reliably to the eyes
of Fedora developers.  The current abrt-desktop virtual package[1]
depends on abrt-plugin-bugzilla, which has a default BugzillaURL =
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/.  To be able to successfully submit data,
you have to go to:  Edit->Preferences, click Bugzilla, click
"Configure Plugin" and enter a username/password; there's no provision
for creating a Bugzilla account here.

I suggest that Fedora infrastructure instead provide a service where
the data in /var/cache/abrt can be submitted via HTTP post as a
tarball, anonymously.  Then the crash UI can be just

"A problem has been detected in [whatever].  Do you want to send this
data to Fedora? [Submit] [ See Data ] [ Cancel ]":

On the server side then we can later write tools to analyze the crash
data (reuse kerneloops?  socorro?  write custom code?).

Secondary concerns:

== kernel/GNOME developer feedback ==

We should ensure Fedora is still sending crashes from the kernel to
kerneloops.org; does ABRT handle this?  Also, ideally on the server
side there would be a web page where a GNOME developer (hi!) could go
to http://crashes.fedoraproject.org/package/gnome-panel and see a list
of crashes sorted by number.

== Privacy ==

ABRT needs some explanation that the crash data may contain private
information.  We may need to restrict visibility of the data to only
Fedora account holders by default or the like, to at least prevent any
future effects like a Slashdot link to a trace where the submitter was
viewing pornography or the like (yes, this happened with GNOME
bugzilla).

But in general, thanks for the work on ABRT, we should get this in by
default for the F12 desktop target.

[1] For RPM/dependency graph people: Why does this exist?  I thought
virtual packages were disallowed?  Should just be in comps I think.
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