Dear TJ,
I doubt this backend can or needs to be released and I'm not sure if
AOOo will benefit from having such a system.
What do you do to read a callstack?
Take the upper lines of it and read their function calls. Somewhere
within the upper part of the callstack you will find the address where
the program called a signal (easiest case SEGV) which caused the crash.
Just before this signal you will mostly find the root cause (a function
call that is not behaving well) of the crash. Often you need to find
other reasons by manually reading the callstack in combination with the
sourcecode. Often you need to consult another developer to get
information about correlation to other code parts. If you know the
memory addresses of this cryptic (and mostly stripped) callstack then
you can resolve these addresses against code segments within your code.
All this can be done manually and by using your brain and possible
automation is not an illusion.
Comparing build-id (part of the data) matching callstacks in combination
with knowing the relative memory addresses (sent with the crash report)
against a matching debug lib (archived within the build system) makes it
quite easy for an experienced C++/Assembler programmer to build a
database that counts a cumulative percentage of the upper stack
addresses of the callstack which helps to detect duplicates to detect
those crashes with the highest frequency and to automatically generate
bugreports to those developers responsible to the exact code snipplet.
This can only be processed if all build systems, debug systems,
database, etc. are centrally hosted within a local network and all
developers are known and are responsible for their code parts to be able
to submit bug reports to them. In my opinion AOOo wouldn't have any
benefit to host the legacy OOo Hamburg build related data because it's
tied to the quite complex build system and to those builds created
within this build system. If a build system is de-centralized (what I
suppose it to be for AOOo) then those who want to provide a crash report
enabled build need to provide their individual backend infrastructure to
process callstacks of their builds against (to be archived) debug libs
of their builds.
Have you thought about the effort it takes to host such a system outside
of a corporate environment ? It's at least *very* expensive...
Am 05.09.2011 15:35, schrieb TJ Frazier:
Another SGA question: what about the back-room, never-released code to
process crash dumps? Details at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Site-QA-Plan /tj/
Just some thoughts
Kind regards, Joost
