Breakpad

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saso
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Breakpad

Post by saso »

How does everyone feel about setting up https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/ or something similar?

Here is a bit of info how LibreOffice is using it https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ ... d-5-3.html

Would it work for us (can we do it)? Would it be useful (will it catch our crashes)? Maybe after 0.17 release... ?
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yorik
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Re: Breakpad

Post by yorik »

Wouldn't we just receive hundreds of unsolvable crash reports? I always wonder, these apps that offer to send a crash report, what do they do with that? Without a bit of "personal" info from the user (what he was doing, etc), and SPECIALLY a bit of follow-up AFTER the bug has been reported, there is usually only a very small percentage of bugs that can be solved that way.

In any case, that would probably means a good work increase on our side only to triage and analyze the reports...

But well, if it works for libreoffice people, maybe I'm wrong...
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Re: Breakpad

Post by lambda »

I don't know how the libreoffice people are using it, but I guess if the crash reports include the exact git commit and you get enough reports, you could actually point to bad commits by mere statistics without any human attention at all. Of course FreeCAD has much less users then libreoffice and probably would receive much less crash reports.

Actually a lot of hints could be found by statistical analysis of stack traces, but I guess this is not an easy project. However if somebody knows a CS student looking for a thesis topic, this might be a nice one.
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Re: Breakpad

Post by ian.rees »

I like the idea, mostly. It seems like, generally speaking, FreeCAD is at a stage where there's a relatively big to-do list versus the developer*hours available. So, I mainly see crash reporting as a tool that could be good for catching new crashes early - like the one mentioned in the LibreOffice writeup - as opposed to another pile of to-do items.

It could also be interesting to be able to correlate results from something like this, with crashes reported in the tracker. That way, we could get the context that Yorik talked about, plus some idea as to how common the bug is in the field.

That said, I think Yorik's concern about it being another developer time suck is completely valid (and, "hundreds" might be a bit optimistic! ;) ). I think it would be good if we used it like we use the Coverity reports, but maybe not so good if it resulted in increased forum noise for example. -Ian-
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Kunda1
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Re: Breakpad

Post by Kunda1 »

FYI, issue #2731 Add exception stacktrace upload function exists in the tracker. @saso feel free to notate it.
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saso
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Re: Breakpad

Post by saso »

Here is a quick overview of the system https://chromium.googlesource.com/break ... reakpad.md

And some more info on different parts of it and clients integrations https://chromium.googlesource.com/break ... ster/docs/
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saso
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Re: Breakpad

Post by saso »

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kkremitzki
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Re: Breakpad

Post by kkremitzki »

saso wrote: Sat Jun 03, 2017 6:24 pm A bit more info on it from the LibreOffice project...

https://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2016/06 ... breoffice/
https://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2017/05 ... an-update/
Nice, that crash reporting server code would make a good basis for the stats.freecad.io page.
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ian.rees
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Re: Breakpad

Post by ian.rees »

Last week, I had an email dialogue with someone at Saleae (they make an electronics tool I use, which is essentially built around Linux/Mac/Windows software) about something unrelated, but ended up asking them about how they do crash reporting. They are apparently switching to breakpad. -Ian-
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Re: Breakpad

Post by Jee-Bee »

ian.rees wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:44 am .. at Saleae (they make an electronics tool I use, which is essentially built around Linux/Mac/Windows software) about ...
I didn't know that brand only pity is that it is just 12 bit bit depth :( otherwise i can probably use it of audio related stuf :D
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