Cooperative Bug Isolation project on Fedora Core 2 & 1

[Ben Liblit]

Marius Andreiana asked:
> Is it possible to get debugging packages for software in FC3t2?

Unfortunately, we're not planning to post FC3t2 packages right now. 
That is due in part to limited manpower and in part to our need for a 
large user base.

To clarify that second requirement, we don't look at individual 
failures.  Rather, we hunt for bugs by mining statistical *trends* out 
of large numbers of runs.  I'm not convinced that there are enough FC3t2 
users to produce the kind of numbers we would need.  I do understand 
that this is where the most unstable code lives, but it's not where the 
most users live, and our techniques really depend on having lots of users.

Now, if the Fedora engineering team wanted make this part of the 
standard Fedora build process, so that *every* test release user would 
be getting our instrumented code, that would be a whole other story....

> Is there anything else to do when seeing an application packaged by you
> crashing?  Or it's all automatic?

You make a one-time choice to opt in or out of the system 
(<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~liblit/sampler/learn-more/privacy/first-time.png>). 
  After that, it's all automatic.

Thanks for your interest and questions, Marius.