DrKonqi 2 moved to kdereview

[George Kiagiadakis]

2009/4/16 Robert Knight <robertknight at gmail.com>:
>> * It rates the backtrace and advises the user to install debugging symbols if
>> required and doesn't allow him to report useless backtraces.
>
> What about facilities or at least hooks for automatically installing
> the symbols or better yet, sending the report off somewhere which can
> generate the complete backtrace automatically like Apport does on
> Ubuntu and maybe other distributions have similar facilities?
>
> The problem is that any work we require the user to do massively
> reduces the percentage of crashes that get reported and this means
> that developers don't know which crashes are really rare and which are
> affecting thousands of users.  Having a button to re-generate
> backtraces and prompting the users to install symbols themselves is an
> incremental step but they won't really solve the problem.

Yes, that was one of the original ideas of Darío when he first started
working on it. However, we faced problems that we couldn't solve:

1) In case where we attempt to install the debugging symbols package,
there is no standard way to find which package contains the needed
debugging symbols. For example, if kopete crashes in kopete code, you
need the debugging symbols for kopete. On debian, this would be the
kdenetwork-dbg package. On arch it would be something like kopete-dbg
(from what I was told). How can we know which package is the correct
one? Moreover, if it crashes in kdelibs/Qt/libc/whatever code, that
needs another package. On debian, kdenetwork-dbg depends on the -dbg
packages of all the required libraries, so this is not a problem, but
I'm not sure if this applies for other distributions... One though
here was to utilize packagekit to do the hard work, but packagekit
does not offer such a function (yet?) and also packagekit is not yet
mature imho, so we can't yet rely on it.

2) If we go for a centralized server that can analyze a core dump,
this would require the server to have packages from all the
distributions installed and even hold previous versions of packages
because a user may not be running with the latest packages of his
distro, so that means huge work on the server side. Apport on ubuntu
can do it (as it is only one distro), but I don't think we can do this
on the kde side.

However, this idea is not dead. We could try to have a discussion with
packagers to see if we can have a working solution for installing the
correct -dbg package and maybe we could create an abstract interface
for talking with a server and have a plugin for apport and whatever
else, if distros want to use this function... Just ideas for now, this
can't make it for 4.3 anyway, so we can think of it later, maybe to
make it for 4.4.