[Fwd: Apport]

[Will Woods]

On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 17:54 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> Passing this along for consideration.

(original email ref:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/distributions/2008-May/000163.html)

I worked on Apport for Fedora during (I think) the F7 release cycle:
https://code.launchpad.net/~wwoods/apport/fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureApport

Things have matured for a year, and I think related technologies have
matured to the point where this could be done right in Fedora and other
distributions. Here's a braindump of some of the things involved.

1) Linux kernel support
Neil Horman worked on a kernel patch that fixed some of the hackery that
Ubuntu's kernel was using to make it work[1].
I don't have the commit id offhand, but the upshot is that you can use
arguments with command pipes in core_pattern as of.. 2.6.24, I think.

2) packaging abstraction
There were some other distro-specific bits to fill in - like looking up
package name from a filename. In Fedora I believe we can easily (and
more accurately) handle this by pulling BuildIDs[2] out of the core dump
itself.

Apport could also be using PackageKit as its packaging backend, rather
than having its own private abstractions for these things.

3) Reporting format
We had a discussion about the proper format for bug reports, and
coordinating this with other projects. Apport is using a RFC822
(essentially email)-formatted bug report with specific "headers"/"tags"
to indicate various metadata about the report[3].

GNOME's bug-buddy, as I understand it, uses Google's Breakpad[4] libs to
generate its reports; Mozilla projects do the same.

Kerneloops is a similar idea but (obviously) their reports are all just
Linux kernel oopses. 

I couldn't find details on a crash-report format specific to KDE but if
someone wants to point me at some existing work in this area I'd
appreciate it.

4) Server-side
Apport in Ubuntu uses launchpad as the server-side to report bugs to;
python-bugzilla[5] came out of my efforts to implement that for Fedora.

Mozilla's Breakpad efforts have produced a server and web client for
collecting and viewing crash reports[6]. I think it makes sense for
Fedora to follow the lead of GNOME and Mozilla and use Breakpad-style
reports.

All the pieces are there. We just need someone with the time, skills,
and drive to put 'em all together.

-w

[1] http://kerneltrap.org/node/14010 
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBuildId
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport#head-43f381da3ef07fd0e601265ff1c835894d77b159
[4] http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/
[5] https://fedorahosted.org/python-bugzilla/
[6] http://wiki.mozilla.org/Breakpad

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