Is there (going to be) an auto-retracer service for KDE?

[Harald Sitter]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 10:38 PM Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org> wrote:
> KDE can't do retracing because KDE hasn't built the packages people use (except KDE Neon).

I've mused on this in the past and I think it can be done, it's just a
lot of work that in particular also will need to involve some web
software to upload to, and manage crashes in.

In broad strokes what needs to happen is:

* get a core instead of a trace - sounds simpler than it is because
cores can be huge and network speed may be limited. google's breakpad
has a special minidump format that seeks to deal with that, I think
apport also has its own reduction format.
* get all the metadata we can find - this likely needs distro
integration depending on the data. this will need (e.g.) a list of
either all installed binary packages and their version, or at least
the ones supplying the files loaded in memory
* upload all the data to a web service and put it in a processing queue
* send all the data off to a distro-specific retracing service - the
distros would need to supply/maintain this. it'd setup an env as
similar to the crashing system as possible, then run a series of gdb
commands to then send the output back to us (this could conceivably be
as simple as a dockerfile)
* we parse the output (which would include a trace) to then either
record a new crash or attach the data to an existing crash

All of this ideally without falling for alluring NIH solutions.

It'd be a huge undertaking and is a bit undermined by the rather
excellent debuginfod [1] that makes our existing way of doing things
more accessible, albeit network-wise just as expensive.

[1] https://sourceware.org/elfutils/Debuginfod.html

For further reference:

- https://abrt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- https://launchpad.net/errors

HS