Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Teemu Rytilahti
Niko Sams wrote:

 Interesting. But no system provides a solution I think.
 Socorro looks very powerful - but they need to process much more
 crashes.

Actually at least Microsoft does, not sure about the others. Not sure how 
much is it used though, but the system has a capability to give an url where 
to get more information and instructions, or even provide a link to a new 
binary where the problem is fixed.

 - If there would be a separate crash-site, could it be worth
 to allow crash
 reports without login?
 Maybe. But I would say we need the email address of the user to contact
 him back.

Yup, depends really on how much can be mined if there'd be a huge load of 
backtraces. Nevertheless, from user point of view asking an email address 
wouldn't be as bad as having to register to a separate site before 
getting/submitting the information.

 - Data sanitation? Ubuntu doesn't reveal the crash reports per
 default as
 they might contain something which shouldn't be public.
 Right. But that sounds like manual work.
 But currently DrKonqi also just posts the backtrace.

True, and this really depends what kind of information is being gathered. 
One thing interesting which is a bit related is that one possibility would 
be to gather other information from the system (Perhaps even per app-basis? 
Automatically getting information about hardware  drivers for kwin bugs, as 
an example). Same applied to other apps might cause some need to sanitize 
and/or let users to choose what to send.

-- 
Best Regards,
Teemu Rytilahti




Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 22:20, Teemu Rytilahti t...@iki.fi wrote:
 Niko Sams wrote:

 Personally I'd go for a solution that also tries to register the last 20
 keystrokes and 20 mouse clicks (qt global event listener) and if and when
 a crash occurs that info can be send with the backtrace.  So even if
 there are no debug packages installed we get some info to do data-mining
 on.
 That would provide useful information? I guess it depends on the
 application and bug.

 In some cases yes, though not sure about how the probable privacy issues
 could be handled nicely there in a way to not make people to avoid using it.
 Not sure how useful it'd be for crashes, and sorry for hijacking the topic
 for a bit again, in some cases a screenshot showing the problem would be
 nice. Perhaps the report dialog could allow one to take a screenshot and
 annotate it someway, just to make it clearer for triagers and developers
 what's the intention :-)

 Either case, I'd think you want something custom written. Its not too
 much work to do the basics and maybe we can steal some code that compares
 backtraces and steal some ideas or code for on-disk data-store of those
 backtraces.
 +1
 The existing solutions are very complex and have lots of features. And
 they solve different
 use cases.

 Have you already looked into traceparser (or any other similar system) to
 see how it does the tricks? Just wondering if code from there could be
 reused.
not yet, but I've seen it's perl :( and apperently integrated into
bugzilla (just reading the project
description)

Niko


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Myriam Schweingruber
Hi all,

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 19:34, Martin Gräßlin mgraess...@kde.org wrote:
 On Monday 12 March 2012 19:26:27 Niko Sams wrote:
 On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 13:57, henry miller h...@millerfarm.com wrote:
...
 *cough*
 https://bugs.kde.org/report.cgi?x_axis_field=resolutiony_axis_field=z_axis_field=query_format=report-
 tableshort_desc_type=allwordssubstrshort_desc=product=kwinbug_status=UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEWbug_status=ASSIGNEDbug_status=REOPENEDbug_status=RESOLVEDbug_status=NEEDSINFObug_status=VERIFIEDbug_status=CLOSEDlongdesc_type=allwordssubstrlongdesc=bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstrbug_file_loc=keywords_type=allwordskeywords=bug_id=bug_id_type=anyexactvotes=votes_type=greaterthaneqbug_severity=crashemailassigned_to1=1emailtype1=substringemail1=emailassigned_to2=1emailreporter2=1emailcc2=1emailtype2=substringemail2=emailtype3=substringemail3=chfield=[Bug+creation]chfieldvalue=chfieldfrom=2011-01-01chfieldto=Nowj_top=ANDf1=noopo1=noopv1=format=tableaction=wrap

 That's the stats for all crash reports reported against kwin since 01/01/2011
 and now. It illustrates nicely one of the major problems of DrKonqui: you can
 report the duplicates.

 Of course KWin is the worst case scenario for measuring DrKonqui as we have
 all those nice driver bugs ;-)

Worst case I don't know, if you apply the report to other large
projects you will get similar figures, see for example for Amarok:
http://bit.ly/wa6m4i

But then, we are all in the same boat with duplicates :)

Just my 2 ct: I don't think the user is able to actually judge if a
report is a duplicate one, so handling this on the server side would
be really a great idea, unless somebody (aka many) have time to triage
this on a daily basis. I agree on at least one point: duplicates
should not be reported without prior triage.

Regards, Myriam.

-- 
Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community
Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE:
http://www.fsfe.org
Please don't send me proprietary file formats,
use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300)


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Ben Cooksley
Hi all,

Whilst I have not evaluated it's compatibility with Bugzilla 4.2, I do
not suppose anyone has looked at
https://launchpad.net/bugzilla-traceparser ?

Regards,
Ben


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Boudewijn Rempt

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012, Ben Cooksley wrote:


Hi all,

Whilst I have not evaluated it's compatibility with Bugzilla 4.2, I do
not suppose anyone has looked at
https://launchpad.net/bugzilla-traceparser ?



That looks very interesting and user-friendly to me.

Boudewijn
(who still has nightmares from having implemented breakpad and 
socorro at a $DAYJOB).


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Niko Sams
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 09:47, Ben Cooksley bcooks...@kde.org wrote:
 Hi all,

 Whilst I have not evaluated it's compatibility with Bugzilla 4.2, I do
 not suppose anyone has looked at
 https://launchpad.net/bugzilla-traceparser ?
well, that's off topic for this thread. But still would probably
make sense to have even with crashes.kde.org.

Niko


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Thomas Zander

Quoting Ben Cooksley bcooks...@kde.org:

Whilst I have not evaluated it's compatibility with Bugzilla 4.2, I do
not suppose anyone has looked at
https://launchpad.net/bugzilla-traceparser ?


The traceparser might be a good-enough solution for finding duplicates  
and helping the reading of backtraces, yes.


This thread is a bit more about solving the inital problem in a  
different way since the actual usage of bugzilla for processing  
backtraces is something that we probably want to sidestep in the first  
place.  Here is why;


* users that get a crash have to have a bugzilla account already if  
they want to give it to us.
This is a problem because developers don't get a good insight of how  
often things crash due to this higher level of contribution. Yes,  
reporting a backtrace makes the user a contributor!


* users that get a crash are asked to themselves figure out if the  
trace is a duplicate and are offered the option to add a cc instead of  
a new report.
This is a problem because users are not capable of doing this and it  
feels less-then-helpful to just cc yourself on a bugreport, which  
means a lot of people just choose the safe route of creating a new  
report.


* bugzilla holds backtraces as plain text in comments. Often mixed  
with user-typed text.
This is a problem because it makes parsing and generating statistics  
and automatic re-assignment near impossible.  Consider how many ark  
and konq bugs there are that are actually a crash inside of a random  
kpart...


* bugzilla is meant to be for developers, users find it provides an  
overkill of info and getting simple disable feature X to stop the  
crashing is just impossible to communicate with the user right now.


* reporting to bugzilla means we have exactly one place where  
*everything* kde based goes. A monolithic database shared by hudreds  
of projects with 15 years of history.
This one is thinking ahead, thinking about the future handling of  
project tasks and bugs and attacking the general dissatisfaction with  
mozillas bugzilla tool (which I won't address here).
This database usage is a problem because it means the data is  
unavailable for innovative (read; not yet invented) usage in  
project-specific task-handling. Its also a problem for groups or  
indivuduals that are geographically too far from bugs.kde.org to have  
nice response times.


Ideally the improvement idea that I see forming in this thread makes  
people stop reporting all backtraces to bugzilla but instead go to a  
component that solves all those issues and one that distills the  
inflow of traces into a limited number of issues.  Those limited  
number of issues can then be made into bugzilla tasks which are  
handled as normal.


So, I'm interested (and active) in solving this in a way that is only  
a little related to bugzilla and get free from the thinking imposed by  
bugzilla.

--
Thomas Zander


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Thomas Zander

Quoting Niko Sams niko.s...@gmail.com:


On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 17:32, Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:

On Monday 12 March 2012 16.20.00 David Jarvie wrote:

There would be an advantage in giving instant feedback to the user if
possible, but if that turns out to be impractical, Thomas's suggestion of
using background processing on the server could be sensible.


I was thinking about this a bit longer today and we[1] might do something
smart like letting the webapp generate a url thats unique for this  
person , or

the report and that url is his status page that will then get updated when
something new happens. A plasma app can use polling at regular intervals to
then show the user how his report progresses, including links to suggestions
like fixed in ver xyz or workarounds like; don't use files with å or é in
them..
Well, we have to see how fast a duplicate search can be done. Maybe  
there could

be a quick search that provides a immediate solution (if available)
and a better  slower
background search.


Good idea!

--
Thomas Zander


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Christoph Feck
On Tuesday 13 March 2012 10:30:59 Thomas Zander wrote:
 Quoting Ben Cooksley bcooks...@kde.org:
  Whilst I have not evaluated it's compatibility with Bugzilla 4.2,
  I do not suppose anyone has looked at
  https://launchpad.net/bugzilla-traceparser ?
 
 The traceparser might be a good-enough solution for finding
 duplicates and helping the reading of backtraces, yes.
 
 This thread is a bit more about solving the inital problem in a
 different way since the actual usage of bugzilla for processing
 backtraces is something that we probably want to sidestep in the
 first place.  Here is why;
 
 * users that get a crash have to have a bugzilla account already if
 they want to give it to us.
 This is a problem because developers don't get a good insight of
 how often things crash due to this higher level of contribution.
 Yes, reporting a backtrace makes the user a contributor!
 
 * users that get a crash are asked to themselves figure out if the
 trace is a duplicate and are offered the option to add a cc instead
 of a new report.
 This is a problem because users are not capable of doing this and
 it feels less-then-helpful to just cc yourself on a bugreport,
 which means a lot of people just choose the safe route of creating
 a new report.

I have long been interested why users keep reporting duplicates. 
Instead of guessing, let's just ask them in a nice way. I added 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295919#c1 to a frequently 
reported bug, and maybe we can this way get some insights. Unless 
someone objects, this survey could be sent to reporters of frequently 
reported crashes (maybe not in the comment, but per reply).

My guess is that DrKonqi simply does not make it clear that the bug 
has already been reported several times.

 * bugzilla holds backtraces as plain text in comments. Often mixed
 with user-typed text.
 This is a problem because it makes parsing and generating
 statistics and automatic re-assignment near impossible.  Consider
 how many ark and konq bugs there are that are actually a crash
 inside of a random kpart...
 
 * bugzilla is meant to be for developers, users find it provides an
 overkill of info and getting simple disable feature X to stop the
 crashing is just impossible to communicate with the user right
 now.
 
 * reporting to bugzilla means we have exactly one place where
 *everything* kde based goes. A monolithic database shared by
 hudreds of projects with 15 years of history.
 This one is thinking ahead, thinking about the future handling of
 project tasks and bugs and attacking the general dissatisfaction
 with mozillas bugzilla tool (which I won't address here).
 This database usage is a problem because it means the data is
 unavailable for innovative (read; not yet invented) usage in
 project-specific task-handling. Its also a problem for groups or
 indivuduals that are geographically too far from bugs.kde.org to
 have nice response times.
 
 Ideally the improvement idea that I see forming in this thread
 makes people stop reporting all backtraces to bugzilla but instead
 go to a component that solves all those issues and one that
 distills the inflow of traces into a limited number of issues. 
 Those limited number of issues can then be made into bugzilla
 tasks which are handled as normal.
 
 So, I'm interested (and active) in solving this in a way that is
 only a little related to bugzilla and get free from the thinking
 imposed by bugzilla.

Bugzilla has a long tradition of being a tool that annoys users, 
developers, as well as bug triagers. Anything that improves the 
situation is welcomed :)

Christoph Feck (kdepepo)
KDE Quality Team


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Myriam Schweingruber
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 17:25, Martin Gräßlin mgraess...@kde.org wrote:
 On Tuesday 13 March 2012 17:00:29 Christoph Feck wrote:
...

 I have long been interested why users keep reporting duplicates.
 Instead of guessing, let's just ask them in a nice way. I added
 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295919#c1 to a frequently
 reported bug, and maybe we can this way get some insights. Unless
 someone objects, this survey could be sent to reporters of frequently
 reported crashes (maybe not in the comment, but per reply).

 My guess is that DrKonqi simply does not make it clear that the bug
 has already been reported several times.

I am pretty sure it doesn't, as the list of the similar bugs appears
at the bottom of the backtrace, a place nobody is going to look for
it. And once it is reported, the user isn't likely to see it either as
s/he will not open the bug report and check what is written at the
bottom of the backtrace.

Dr. Konqi should clearly display the possible duplicates to the user,
on top of the backtrace or by a message telling that possible
duplicates were found. The message could then continue like this: if
you are unsure whether your report is a duplicate or not, stop here,
if you are an experience users who knows how to read backtraces and
find duplicates you can continue. (in a more appropriate wording of
course).

Regards, Myriam
-- 
Proud member of the Amarok and KDE Community
Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE:
http://www.fsfe.org
Please don't send me proprietary file formats,
use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300)


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread henry miller
Don't forget security and privacy. The last n keys would be a bad thing to have 
if the user just entered a password.
-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:

Quoting Niko Sams niko.s...@gmail.com:

 On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 11:36, Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:
 I'd say this is a great idea, mostly because it means a lot more can be
 automated on lots of ends.
 Naturally, the actual automation means research and development, which means
 manpower.   I didn't get from your email if you wanted to volunteer for some
 of this work :)

 Personally I'd go for a solution that also tries to register the last 20
 keystrokes and 20 mouse clicks (qt global event listener) and if and when a
 crash occurs that info can be send with the backtrace.  So even if there are
 no debug packages installed we get some info to do data-mining on.

 That would provide useful information? I guess it depends on the
 application and bug.

In my experience its useful in many cases. If your application is 
complicated then just having a backtrace, even with linenumbers, may 
not allow you to reproduce the crash. You need some extra info to know 
what the user did just before it crashed.
Asking the user is not the best solution; I've seen many backtraces 
with a comment from the user stating they were typing some text, while 
the backtrace showed they were printing. Its hard to be a debugger 
when your work just got lost...
A better solution would be that we know which buttons were clicked and 
that the user pressed the tab button or the ctrl-w buttons etc.
So, I'd say this can be very useful to get the whole picture of the 
moment the crash happened :)

And this also means that duplicates are good, the backtrace may be the 
same but we still add useful info to the issue.

 Either case, I'd think you want something custom written. Its not too much
 work to do the basics and maybe we can steal some code that compares
 backtraces and steal some ideas or code for on-disk data-store of those
 backtraces.
 +1
 The existing solutions are very complex and have lots of features. And
 they solve different
 use cases.

Hmm, its indeed not easy to find something fitting. Looking at the 
code of one of the links found in this thread, I notice its written in 
perl. While I understand the urge to do that, I'm not convinced that 
there is enough perl knowledge in KDE to make sysadmin happy if we 
just imported their systems. How hard can it be to parse a backtrace 
anyway? ;-)
Anyway, the actual core parsing and matching will probably be 
something that can be improved over time. Possibly with the help of 
other open source code.

-- 
Thomas Zander



Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-13 Thread Niko Sams
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 12:27, Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:
 Hmm, its indeed not easy to find something fitting. Looking at the code of
 one of the links found in this thread, I notice its written in perl. While I
 understand the urge to do that, I'm not convinced that there is enough perl
 knowledge in KDE to make sysadmin happy if we just imported their systems.
 How hard can it be to parse a backtrace anyway? ;-)
 Anyway, the actual core parsing and matching will probably be something that
 can be improved over time. Possibly with the help of other open source code.
I just found this, seems promising:
https://fedorahosted.org/btparser/

Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Teemu Rytilahti
Niko Sams wrote:

 Hi,

Hello, more discussion about how to handle bugs are welcome, I 
hope. Wasn't 
able to get in to the earlier thread, so I thought I should 
post something 
here.

 In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to 
a layer
 between.

This really depends on how it'd be used, but perhaps yeah, 
this might be a 
good idea indeed. This is something I encountered while 
working on a course 
paper earlier this semester. Similar systems are up there for 
Mozilla 
(Socorro[1], shown in here [2], Microsoft [3] and Ubuntu too. 
I bet that 
LibreOffice might have something similar too, but haven't 
looked into that.

One thing which makes all of this easier for them though is 
that they're 
providing the binaries directly, which basically means that 
they can do all 
kinds of niceties out there too. See [4] for an example from 
Ubuntu-land.

This doesn't though mean that we couldn't do similar in KDE 
too, and it 
probably would be a good idea.

 crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to 
bugzilla:
 - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering 
duplicates

I think DrKonqi already can get information whether there's 
duplicates 
already with the same backtrace, or at least that information 
is available 
for DrKonqi-reported bugs. One thing to consider there would 
be whether 
Traceparser[5] (used in Gnome's bugzilla, too) could be used 
there if needed 
to get numerical scores for backtraces.

 - developers can set duplicates

Not sure whether this would work, more manual work all around 
while the 
triagers are already overloaded afaik. As much as possible 
should be done 
automatically. Though I think the duplicate detector in 
DrKonqi works quite 
well nowadays and doesn't allow even submit duplicate crashes.

 - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create 
automatically a bug
 for a crash)

This is how it works for Mozilla at least if I haven't 
misunderstand their 
processes. A good idea. This can be used later on to redirect 
the user to 
the bug like you mention later on.

 - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to 
the user
 that hits this crash)
[snip]
 - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how 
to reproduce
 etc)

How about just having the crashes linked to b.k.o entry? So 
that the crash 
database would just for crashes, no comments etc.

 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a 
duplicate. User
 gets the possibility to
   subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a 
solution
 for his crash was entered
   by the developers

I don't like the idea of having a separate place for comments 
and/or 
solutions, but that's just me. In my opinion the commenting 
could happen in 
a valid b.k.o entry as needed.
 
 Advantages over current solution:
 - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates

Not sure if this is an issue anymore regarding to crashes. 
Couldn't find the 
blog entry related to this quickly, but here's a reviewboard 
entry: [6] . 
Anyway, the idea is good nevertheless.

 - sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that 
bug but
 also help the user by showing
   a solution for his issue.

This would be a great plus indeed, though would need 
adaptation on processes 
depending on how specific solutions should be shown to the 
user. If fixed-in 
tags or similar are set to bugs when they're fixed, that 
information could 
be easily given to user in a this bug is fixed in version x 
sense.

 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe 
a
 bugzilla installation or something
 custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.
 
 So, what do you think?

Some things to consider:
- If there would be a separate crash-site, could it be worth 
to allow crash 
reports without login?
- Data sanitation? Ubuntu doesn't reveal the crash reports per 
default as 
they might contain something which shouldn't be public.
- It might be possible to use a separate Bugzilla instance 
just for this, 
but I'm not sure how well migrating bugs between instances do 
work or 
whether that's worth it.
- When getting duplicate backtraces from users the bug entry 
could be 
updated automatically with the version the crash happened, 
this would in my 
opinion be a plus in a sense that can reproduce in version x 
entries 
wouldn't flood the comment section. Anyway, this is something 
which could be 
generally available for all bugs...
- Is there a need to keep duplicate crashes in the database, 
maybe for false 
positives?

The workflow could be something like this:
1. User encounters a crash and is asked whether to send a 
report.
2. If yes, a backtrace is being send to the server.
3. If there's a complete match, just inform the user about it 
and give a 
link to a bug report / perhaps allow add a new comment to 
report?
4. If no complete matches available, ask user for more 
information what 
happened, just like Konqi does already.
5. Make an entry to the crash database.
6. 

Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Milian Wolff
On Monday 12 March 2012 02:14:00 Teemu Rytilahti wrote:
 Niko Sams wrote:
  Hi,
 
 Hello, more discussion about how to handle bugs are welcome, I
 hope. Wasn't
 able to get in to the earlier thread, so I thought I should
 post something
 here.
 
  In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to
 
 a layer
 
  between.
 
 This really depends on how it'd be used, but perhaps yeah,
 this might be a
 good idea indeed. This is something I encountered while
 working on a course
 paper earlier this semester. Similar systems are up there for
 Mozilla
 (Socorro[1], shown in here [2], Microsoft [3] and Ubuntu too.
 I bet that
 LibreOffice might have something similar too, but haven't
 looked into that.
 
 One thing which makes all of this easier for them though is
 that they're
 providing the binaries directly, which basically means that
 they can do all
 kinds of niceties out there too. See [4] for an example from
 Ubuntu-land.
 
 This doesn't though mean that we couldn't do similar in KDE
 too, and it
 probably would be a good idea.

While nice this is not required for Niko's proposal. Either the backtrace is 
automatically associated with a solution, or a developer later on associates 
it with a solution or a bug report. In the former case, the user gets direct 
feedback on what's going on. In the latter, he will at least get a concise 
email - at least that's what I have in mind (and I think Niko as well).

The big difference to our current solution is just that users get far less 
emails, like bug XYZ marked as duplicate. Or mails for developer discussions 
in bug reports, something that most users won't understand anyways.

  crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to
 
 bugzilla:
  - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering
 
 duplicates
 
 I think DrKonqi already can get information whether there's
 duplicates
 already with the same backtrace, or at least that information
 is available
 for DrKonqi-reported bugs. One thing to consider there would
 be whether
 Traceparser[5] (used in Gnome's bugzilla, too) could be used
 there if needed
 to get numerical scores for backtraces.
 
  - developers can set duplicates
 
 Not sure whether this would work, more manual work all around
 while the
 triagers are already overloaded afaik. As much as possible
 should be done
 automatically. Though I think the duplicate detector in
 DrKonqi works quite
 well nowadays and doesn't allow even submit duplicate crashes.

Hum how is this more work? Actually I cannot see how this can create more 
work, if at all only the same amount. On the contrary I think Niko's proposal 
can reduce the workload! The reason is that users should then - in theory - 
get a concise, short and readable instruction that should explain them how to 
fix their crash. Update to version XYZ for example.

Even in KDevelop, an app where our userbase should be somewhat proficient with 
the whole development process, we get tons of emails because people add their 
+1 crashed for me as well backtraces to some hideously old bug report. And 
why? Because they don't read the bug reports. Somewhere in the comments there 
might be a fixed by commit xyz message, but they simply don't care.

If now they would see a simple this is fixed by version XYZ - please update, 
then it would help me personally quite much already.

Of course we can still improve the backtrace matching eventually, but this is 
unrelated to the proposal at hand here I think.

  - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create
 
 automatically a bug
 
  for a crash)
 
 This is how it works for Mozilla at least if I haven't
 misunderstand their
 processes. A good idea. This can be used later on to redirect
 the user to
 the bug like you mention later on.
 
  - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to
 
 the user
 
  that hits this crash)
 
 [snip]
 
  - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how
 
 to reproduce
 
  etc)
 
 How about just having the crashes linked to b.k.o entry? So
 that the crash
 database would just for crashes, no comments etc.

+1

either the crash is new - new entry, or the crash is not yet fixed - comment 
on b.k.o. 

  - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a
 
 duplicate. User
 
  gets the possibility to
  
subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a
 
 solution
 
  for his crash was entered
  
by the developers
 
 I don't like the idea of having a separate place for comments
 and/or
 solutions, but that's just me. In my opinion the commenting
 could happen in
 a valid b.k.o entry as needed.

yes, see above. solutions should be separated though - otherwise people won't 
find it. that's the crucial point here I think.

  Advantages over current solution:
  - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
 
 Not sure if this is an issue anymore regarding to crashes.
 Couldn't find the
 blog entry related to this quickly, but here's a reviewboard
 entry: [6] .
 Anyway, 

Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Thomas Zander

On Sunday 11 March 2012 11.26.53 Niko Sams wrote:

I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi

[]

What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe abugzilla
installation or somethingcustom written. Or some other bugtracking software.


I'd say this is a great idea, mostly because it means a lot more can  
be automated on lots of ends.
Naturally, the actual automation means research and development, which  
means manpower.   I didn't get from your email if you wanted to  
volunteer for some of this work :)


Personally I'd go for a solution that also tries to register the last  
20 keystrokes and 20 mouse clicks (qt global event listener) and if  
and when a crash occurs that info can be send with the backtrace.  So  
even if there are no debug packages installed we get some info to do  
data-mining on.


I'd also make your webpage (or site) be mostly dumb in the handling of  
the data its being sent and then have a continues job on the machine  
to actually process and handle these crash reports.  So if we get  
loads of requests in, we just store the data to be processed when  
there is CPU available.
The reason is that I think we get much more useful information out of  
this if we allow it to take more time than a webrequest would allow.  
And also this will make the site much more responsive and painless.

It just scales better ;)

Either case, I'd think you want something custom written. Its not too  
much work to do the basics and maybe we can steal some code that  
compares backtraces and steal some ideas or code for on-disk  
data-store of those backtraces.


Niko, I'm wondering if you can help out with realization of your  
ideas, and if you have php or perl skills for instance.
I might find some time on my hands, and it sounds like a fun (and  
needed) project so I could help out.


Cheers
--
Thomas Zander


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Teemu Rytilahti
Milian Wolff wrote:

Hi again,

 While nice this is not required for Niko's proposal. Either the backtrace
 is automatically associated with a solution, or a developer later on
 associates it with a solution or a bug report. In the former case, the
 user gets direct feedback on what's going on. In the latter, he will at
 least get a concise email - at least that's what I have in mind (and I
 think Niko as well).
 
 The big difference to our current solution is just that users get far less
 emails, like bug XYZ marked as duplicate. Or mails for developer
 discussions in bug reports, something that most users won't understand
 anyways.

Hmm, indeed, looks like I got carried out there, sorry about that. And yeah, 
I agree with that there should be a way to give a clear message to the 
users.


 Not sure whether this would work, more manual work all around
 while the
 triagers are already overloaded afaik. As much as possible
 should be done
 automatically. Though I think the duplicate detector in
 DrKonqi works quite
 well nowadays and doesn't allow even submit duplicate crashes.
 
 Hum how is this more work? Actually I cannot see how this can create more
 work, if at all only the same amount. On the contrary I think Niko's
 proposal can reduce the workload! The reason is that users should then -
 in theory - get a concise, short and readable instruction that should
 explain them how to fix their crash. Update to version XYZ for example.

Keeping up the information in two separate databases wouldn't do good was my 
ppint. But yeah, perhaps b.k.o should have some kind of separate field for 
that kind of information, which would be then given out as needed.

 Even in KDevelop, an app where our userbase should be somewhat proficient
 with the whole development process, we get tons of emails because people
 add their +1 crashed for me as well backtraces to some hideously old bug
 report. And why? Because they don't read the bug reports. Somewhere in the
 comments there might be a fixed by commit xyz message, but they simply
 don't care.
 
 If now they would see a simple this is fixed by version XYZ - please
 update, then it would help me personally quite much already.

Yeah, agreed. In my opinion the comment section of bug entries could be even 
more cleaned out, to just contain comments for example. Tens of marked as 
duplicate of messages do not bring much more info while disturbing the real 
comments. Mozilla uses an extension called inline history which shows 
changes to bug statuses and also combine successive duplicate reports, 
though the process is apparently so heavy the feature is not enabled for 
users not logged in.


  Advantages over current solution:
  - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
 
 Not sure if this is an issue anymore regarding to crashes.
 Couldn't find the
 blog entry related to this quickly, but here's a reviewboard
 entry: [6] .
 Anyway, the idea is good nevertheless.
 
 maybe not duplicates, but definitely about +1 crashes for me as well
 messages for long since fixed crashes.

Hmm, yup. The traceparser makes inlined backtraces to be not so verbose, but 
doesn't remove the problem completely.

 This would be a great plus indeed, though would need
 adaptation on processes
 depending on how specific solutions should be shown to the
 user. If fixed-in
 tags or similar are set to bugs when they're fixed, that
 information could
 be easily given to user in a this bug is fixed in version x
 sense.
 
 or the developer takes the time to tell people he fixed the bug somewhere.
 seriously, that's not too much to ask of them

True, perhaps a separate field could be provided, and the comment closing 
the bug could be used if none specified?

 Some things to consider:
 - If there would be a separate crash-site, could it be worth
 to allow crash reports without login?
 
 maybe in the first step, but once they found an actual crash I really
 think they need to provide an email for asking for feedback and such.

Yup, this comment was more about not having a need to create a separate 
login, as I think that'll still be the barrier for getting reports. But 
yeah, there are two sides in this.

 - Data sanitation? Ubuntu doesn't reveal the crash reports per
 default as
 they might contain something which shouldn't be public.
 
 how is this related to this proposal? our current solution has the same
 problem and maybe/probably some kind of code in place to achieve that.

Well, basically if the reporting crashes will be much easier (esp. if no 
login is needed) and there'll be loads of more reports, then issues might 
surface on this front. This was mostly food for thought though.

 - When getting duplicate backtraces from users the bug entry
 could be
 updated automatically with the version the crash happened,
 this would in my
 opinion be a plus in a sense that can reproduce in version x
 entries
 wouldn't flood the comment section. Anyway, this is something
 which could be
 generally 

Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread David Jarvie
On Mon, March 12, 2012 10:36 am, Thomas Zander wrote:
 On Sunday 11 March 2012 11.26.53 Niko Sams wrote:
 I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi
 []
 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe abugzilla
 installation or somethingcustom written. Or some other bugtracking
 software.

 I'd say this is a great idea, mostly because it means a lot more can
 be automated on lots of ends.

I like this idea too.

 I'd also make your webpage (or site) be mostly dumb in the handling of
 the data its being sent and then have a continues job on the machine
 to actually process and handle these crash reports.  So if we get
 loads of requests in, we just store the data to be processed when
 there is CPU available.
 The reason is that I think we get much more useful information out of
 this if we allow it to take more time than a webrequest would allow.
 And also this will make the site much more responsive and painless.
 It just scales better ;)

There would be an advantage in giving instant feedback to the user if
possible, but if that turns out to be impractical, Thomas's suggestion of
using background processing on the server could be sensible.


I think Niko's proposal points to a deficiency in the current bug
reporting system, in that the current system doesn't provide a facility to
present the user with a quick summary of actions to take to resolve/work
around the bug. True, it does have the 'version fixed in' field for bugs
which are fixed, but there's nowhere that the developer can enter
workarounds etc. without them being lost in the bug discussion.

I'd suggest an extra text field called 'User action summary' at the top of
the bug report, under 'version fixed in'. Its purpose would be to give a
brief summary of how to avoid the bug (upgrade to version x.y.z / any
workarounds / etc.) or what is required from users to investigate it (e.g.
a summary of information needed). Reference could be made in the summary
to individual comments in the bug report. The user action summary should
only be editable by the assignee, to prevent users taking it upon
themselves to enter mistaken information.

This field could serve two purposes:

1) It would enable users to see at a glance what the status of the bug is,
even in a bug report containing long winded discussion or lots of
duplicate reports.

2) It could be used when crash reporting, to provide the user-intelligible
feedback which Niko is proposing. In this case, of course, there would
need to be a link between any crashes.kde.org and bugs.kde.org.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KDE developer.
KAlarm author - http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm



Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 13:57, henry miller h...@millerfarm.com wrote:
 Good ideas, if anyone actually implements it. A couple of comments.

 Most users are not programmers - they will not know how to recogize similear
 backtraces are the same root cause. Worse I know of many cases where I - a
 programmer - was wrong.

 The more automated detection we can do the better. In fact many random
 crashes have been traced down to the same root cause, so we really need the
 ability to check the user's config in a distribution specific way. If some
 misconfiguration is found we can ignore the backtrace.
DrKonqi already detects duplicates, which works pretty good usually.
But there is still room for improvement...

Niko


Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 19:34, Martin Gräßlin mgraess...@kde.org wrote:
 On Monday 12 March 2012 19:26:27 Niko Sams wrote:
 On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 13:57, henry miller h...@millerfarm.com wrote:
  Good ideas, if anyone actually implements it. A couple of comments.
 
  Most users are not programmers - they will not know how to recogize
  similear backtraces are the same root cause. Worse I know of many cases
  where I - a programmer - was wrong.
 
  The more automated detection we can do the better. In fact many random
  crashes have been traced down to the same root cause, so we really need
  the
  ability to check the user's config in a distribution specific way. If some
  misconfiguration is found we can ignore the backtrace.

 DrKonqi already detects duplicates, which works pretty good usually.
 But there is still room for improvement...
 *cough*
 https://bugs.kde.org/report.cgi?x_axis_field=resolutiony_axis_field=z_axis_field=query_format=report-
 tableshort_desc_type=allwordssubstrshort_desc=product=kwinbug_status=UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEWbug_status=ASSIGNEDbug_status=REOPENEDbug_status=RESOLVEDbug_status=NEEDSINFObug_status=VERIFIEDbug_status=CLOSEDlongdesc_type=allwordssubstrlongdesc=bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstrbug_file_loc=keywords_type=allwordskeywords=bug_id=bug_id_type=anyexactvotes=votes_type=greaterthaneqbug_severity=crashemailassigned_to1=1emailtype1=substringemail1=emailassigned_to2=1emailreporter2=1emailcc2=1emailtype2=substringemail2=emailtype3=substringemail3=chfield=[Bug+creation]chfieldvalue=chfieldfrom=2011-01-01chfieldto=Nowj_top=ANDf1=noopo1=noopv1=format=tableaction=wrap

 That's the stats for all crash reports reported against kwin since 01/01/2011
 and now. It illustrates nicely one of the major problems of DrKonqui: you can
 report the duplicates.

 Of course KWin is the worst case scenario for measuring DrKonqui as we have
 all those nice driver bugs ;-)
wow, you poor guy :D

Well then KWin would profit a lot! And finding duplicates should be
done server side,
so it can be improved without having to wait for DrKonqi getting updated.


Niko


Re: Re: Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Martin Gräßlin
On Monday 12 March 2012 19:39:12 Niko Sams wrote:
 On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 19:34, Martin Gräßlin mgraess...@kde.org wrote:
  On Monday 12 March 2012 19:26:27 Niko Sams wrote:
  On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 13:57, henry miller h...@millerfarm.com wrote:
   Good ideas, if anyone actually implements it. A couple of comments.
  
   Most users are not programmers - they will not know how to recogize
   similear backtraces are the same root cause. Worse I know of many cases
   where I - a programmer - was wrong.
  
   The more automated detection we can do the better. In fact many random
   crashes have been traced down to the same root cause, so we really need
   the
   ability to check the user's config in a distribution specific way. If
   some
   misconfiguration is found we can ignore the backtrace.
 
  DrKonqi already detects duplicates, which works pretty good usually.
  But there is still room for improvement...
 
  *cough*
  https://bugs.kde.org/report.cgi?x_axis_field=resolutiony_axis_field=z_ax
  is_field=query_format=report-
  tableshort_desc_type=allwordssubstrshort_desc=product=kwinbug_status  
  UNCONFIRMEDbug_status=NEWbug_status=ASSIGNEDbug_status=REOPENEDbug_sta
  tus=RESOLVEDbug_status=NEEDSINFObug_status=VERIFIEDbug_status=CLOSEDlo
  ngdesc_type=allwordssubstrlongdesc=bug_file_loc_type=allwordssubstrbug_
  file_loc=keywords_type=allwordskeywords=bug_id=bug_id_type=anyexactvo
  tes=votes_type=greaterthaneqbug_severity=crashemailassigned_to1=1email
  type1=substringemail1=emailassigned_to2=1emailreporter2=1emailcc2=1em
  ailtype2=substringemail2=emailtype3=substringemail3=chfield=[Bug+creat
  ion]chfieldvalue=chfieldfrom 11-01-01chfieldto=Nowj_top=ANDf1=noop
  o1=noopv1=format=tableaction=wrap
 
  That's the stats for all crash reports reported against kwin since
  01/01/2011 and now. It illustrates nicely one of the major problems of
  DrKonqui: you can report the duplicates.
 
  Of course KWin is the worst case scenario for measuring DrKonqui as we
  have
  all those nice driver bugs ;-)

 wow, you poor guy :D

 Well then KWin would profit a lot!
yes, indeed and I must say that I think your idea is great. If a project gets
started I will support it, just to get to the point where we can tell users:
click foo than bar to disable baz and the crash is gone :-)

Cheers
Martin
 And finding duplicates should be
 done server side,
 so it can be improved without having to wait for DrKonqi getting updated.


 Niko


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Description: This is a digitally signed message part.


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 09:54, Milian Wolff m...@milianw.de wrote:
 On Monday 12 March 2012 02:14:00 Teemu Rytilahti wrote:
 - When getting duplicate backtraces from users the bug entry
 could be
 updated automatically with the version the crash happened,
 this would in my
 opinion be a plus in a sense that can reproduce in version x
 entries
 wouldn't flood the comment section. Anyway, this is something
 which could be
 generally available for all bugs...

 I don't get how this is valuable feedback. If I didn't fix a bug of course it
 will be reproducible in later versions?!
yeah, those people commenting  after every release that the bug is
still not (magically) fixed :D

 - Is there a need to keep duplicate crashes in the database,
 maybe for false
 positives?

 hu? I don't get this one. if it's a duplicate then by definition one doesn't
 need its information because it's already known?!
I would store all crashes, also duplicates
- maybe it's a false positive (that's what Teemu is talking about I think)
- it's an important fact to see how common a crash is

Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 01:14, Teemu Rytilahti t...@iki.fi wrote:
 This really depends on how it'd be used, but perhaps yeah,
 this might be a
 good idea indeed. This is something I encountered while
 working on a course
 paper earlier this semester. Similar systems are up there for
 Mozilla
 (Socorro[1], shown in here [2], Microsoft [3] and Ubuntu too.
 I bet that
 LibreOffice might have something similar too, but haven't
 looked into that.
Interesting. But no system provides a solution I think.
Socorro looks very powerful - but they need to process much more
crashes.

 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a
 duplicate. User
 gets the possibility to
   subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a
 solution
 for his crash was entered
   by the developers

 I don't like the idea of having a separate place for comments
 and/or
 solutions, but that's just me. In my opinion the commenting
 could happen in
 a valid b.k.o entry as needed.
Sounds good. One place is enough and fragmentation would be bad.

 - If there would be a separate crash-site, could it be worth
 to allow crash
 reports without login?
Maybe. But I would say we need the email address of the user to contact
him back.

 - Data sanitation? Ubuntu doesn't reveal the crash reports per
 default as
 they might contain something which shouldn't be public.
Right. But that sounds like manual work.
But currently DrKonqi also just posts the backtrace.

Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 17:32, Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:
 On Monday 12 March 2012 16.20.00 David Jarvie wrote:
 There would be an advantage in giving instant feedback to the user if
 possible, but if that turns out to be impractical, Thomas's suggestion of
 using background processing on the server could be sensible.

 I was thinking about this a bit longer today and we[1] might do something
 smart like letting the webapp generate a url thats unique for this person , or
 the report and that url is his status page that will then get updated when
 something new happens. A plasma app can use polling at regular intervals to
 then show the user how his report progresses, including links to suggestions
 like fixed in ver xyz or workarounds like; don't use files with å or é in
 them..
Well, we have to see how fast a duplicate search can be done. Maybe there could
be a quick search that provides a immediate solution (if available)
and a better  slower
background search.

Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-12 Thread Niko Sams
On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 11:36, Thomas Zander zan...@kde.org wrote:
 On Sunday 11 March 2012 11.26.53 Niko Sams wrote:

 I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi

 []

 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe abugzilla
 installation or somethingcustom written. Or some other bugtracking
 software.


 I'd say this is a great idea, mostly because it means a lot more can be
 automated on lots of ends.
 Naturally, the actual automation means research and development, which means
 manpower.   I didn't get from your email if you wanted to volunteer for some
 of this work :)

 Personally I'd go for a solution that also tries to register the last 20
 keystrokes and 20 mouse clicks (qt global event listener) and if and when a
 crash occurs that info can be send with the backtrace.  So even if there are
 no debug packages installed we get some info to do data-mining on.
That would provide useful information? I guess it depends on the
application and bug.

 Either case, I'd think you want something custom written. Its not too much
 work to do the basics and maybe we can steal some code that compares
 backtraces and steal some ideas or code for on-disk data-store of those
 backtraces.
+1
The existing solutions are very complex and have lots of features. And
they solve different
use cases.

 Niko, I'm wondering if you can help out with realization of your ideas, and
 if you have php or perl skills for instance.
 I might find some time on my hands, and it sounds like a fun (and needed)
 project so I could help out.
I would have php skills, but I don't have that much spare time.

But with the positive feedback so far I think I will start with something.


Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-11 Thread Anders Lund
Søndag den 11. marts 2012 11:26:53 skrev Niko Sams:
 Hi,
 
 I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi (which is a really
 useful thing btw) could be
 further improved.
 In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to a layer
 between.
 
 DrKonqi - crashes.kde.org - bugs.kde.org
 
 crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to bugzilla:
 - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering duplicates
 - developers can set duplicates
 - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create automatically a bug
 for a crash)
 - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to the user
 that hits this crash)
eg.:
   - update to version x.y
   - temporary workaround: don't click button x
   - you missconfigured x, see http://y.com how to fix
   - the developers are aware of this issue but have not yet fixed
 it, see http://bugs.kde.org/... for details
   - the bug is fixed but an update has not yet been released.
 Update to version x.y once it released.
 - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how to reproduce
 etc)
 
 For the end user there could be the following scenarios:
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org finds a duplicate crash in
 it's database and will tell the
   user on how to proceed (see possible solutions above)
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org can't find an exact duplicate
 and will show the user
   all possible duplicates
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a duplicate. User
 gets the possibility to
   subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a solution
 for his crash was entered
   by the developers
 
 One big difference in implementation I would propose:
 DrKonqi makes a *single* POST to crashes.kde.org including all
 information and then just shows
 a WebView where the server side can do anything. That gives greater
 independence of the used
 KDE version and changes on the server side.
 
 Advantages over current solution:
 - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
 - crashes.kde.org can be specialized on crashes
 - sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that bug but
 also help the user by showing
   a solution for his issue.
 
 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe a
 bugzilla installation or something
 custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.
 
 So, what do you think?
 Niko

+1

I think communicating back to the user this way would be a great improvement 
on user experience wrt bug handling. Sounds like the communication would be 
much more/better structured than it is now.

Anders


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-11 Thread Steven Sroka

On 2012-03-11, at 10:21 AM, Milian Wolff wrote:

 On Sunday 11 March 2012 11:26:53 Niko Sams wrote:
 Hi,
 
 I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi (which is a really
 useful thing btw) could be
 further improved.
 In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to a layer
 between.
 
 DrKonqi - crashes.kde.org - bugs.kde.org
 
 crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to bugzilla:
 - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering duplicates
 - developers can set duplicates
 - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create automatically a bug
 for a crash)
 - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to the user
 that hits this crash)
   eg.:
  - update to version x.y
  - temporary workaround: don't click button x
  - you missconfigured x, see http://y.com how to fix
  - the developers are aware of this issue but have not yet fixed
 it, see http://bugs.kde.org/... for details
  - the bug is fixed but an update has not yet been released.
 Update to version x.y once it released.
 - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how to reproduce
 etc)
 
 For the end user there could be the following scenarios:
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org finds a duplicate crash in
 it's database and will tell the
  user on how to proceed (see possible solutions above)
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org can't find an exact duplicate
 and will show the user
  all possible duplicates
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a duplicate. User
 gets the possibility to
  subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a solution
 for his crash was entered
  by the developers
 
 One big difference in implementation I would propose:
 DrKonqi makes a *single* POST to crashes.kde.org including all
 information and then just shows
 a WebView where the server side can do anything. That gives greater
 independence of the used
 KDE version and changes on the server side.
 
 Advantages over current solution:
 - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
 - crashes.kde.org can be specialized on crashes
 - sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that bug but
 also help the user by showing
  a solution for his issue.
 
 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe a
 bugzilla installation or something
 custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.
 
 In short: I like the idea.
 
 But I guess this needs someone to step up and actually write the required 
 software. I doubt our dear sysadmins can spare the time and I also wonder 
 whether it's worth to spent time on getting this quite custom functionality 
 into an existing bugtracker software instead of writing the software on once 
 own.

It would take quite some effort. I would say building this into bugs.kde.org 
would be the better option since the less layers, the complex the bug tracker 
is.

Side note: Niko, what you are proposing is something that Windows Error 
Reporting has been doing for years, and it seems to have served Microsoft well 
:)

The problem is… do we have the resources to implement it *if* it is the best 
solution for us?



 
 Just for the ability to offer the user explicit feedback on his crash this 
 project would be very appreciated though!
 
 bye
 -- 
 Milian Wolff
 m...@milianw.de
 http://milianw.de



Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-11 Thread Niko Sams
Am 11.03.2012 17:34 schrieb Steven Sroka sroka.ste...@gmail.com:


 On 2012-03-11, at 10:21 AM, Milian Wolff wrote:

  On Sunday 11 March 2012 11:26:53 Niko Sams wrote:
  Hi,
 
  I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi (which is a really
  useful thing btw) could be
  further improved.
  In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to a layer
  between.
 
  DrKonqi - crashes.kde.org - bugs.kde.org
 
  crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to bugzilla:
  - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering duplicates
  - developers can set duplicates
  - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create automatically a bug
  for a crash)
  - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to the user
  that hits this crash)
eg.:
   - update to version x.y
   - temporary workaround: don't click button x
   - you missconfigured x, see http://y.com how to fix
   - the developers are aware of this issue but have not yet fixed
  it, see http://bugs.kde.org/... for details
   - the bug is fixed but an update has not yet been released.
  Update to version x.y once it released.
  - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how to
reproduce
  etc)
 
  For the end user there could be the following scenarios:
  - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org finds a duplicate crash in
  it's database and will tell the
   user on how to proceed (see possible solutions above)
  - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org can't find an exact duplicate
  and will show the user
   all possible duplicates
  - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a duplicate. User
  gets the possibility to
   subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a solution
  for his crash was entered
   by the developers
 
  One big difference in implementation I would propose:
  DrKonqi makes a *single* POST to crashes.kde.org including all
  information and then just shows
  a WebView where the server side can do anything. That gives greater
  independence of the used
  KDE version and changes on the server side.
 
  Advantages over current solution:
  - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
  - crashes.kde.org can be specialized on crashes
  - sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that bug but
  also help the user by showing
   a solution for his issue.
 
  What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe a
  bugzilla installation or something
  custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.
 
  In short: I like the idea.
 
  But I guess this needs someone to step up and actually write the
required
  software. I doubt our dear sysadmins can spare the time and I also
wonder
  whether it's worth to spent time on getting this quite custom
functionality
  into an existing bugtracker software instead of writing the software on
once
  own.

 It would take quite some effort. I would say building this into
bugs.kde.org would be the better option since the less layers, the complex
the bug tracker is.
I'd wouldn't do that - because it's not about bugs - it's about crashes.
And instead of messing with the existing bugzilla I'd create something new.


 Side note: Niko, what you are proposing is something that Windows Error
Reporting has been doing for years, and it seems to have served Microsoft
well :)

afaik windows sends only the errors (similar to what mozilla, gnome, ubuntu
and others have).
My idea is more than that.

Niko


Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-11 Thread Gary Greene
On Mar 11, 2012, at 3:26 AM, Niko Sams wrote:
 Hi,
 
 I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi (which is a really
 useful thing btw) could be
 further improved.
 In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to a layer 
 between.
 
 DrKonqi - crashes.kde.org - bugs.kde.org
 
 crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to bugzilla:
 - lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering duplicates
 - developers can set duplicates
 - developers can link a crash to a bug (or create automatically a bug
 for a crash)
 - developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to the user
 that hits this crash)
   eg.:
  - update to version x.y
  - temporary workaround: don't click button x
  - you missconfigured x, see http://y.com how to fix
  - the developers are aware of this issue but have not yet fixed
 it, see http://bugs.kde.org/... for details
  - the bug is fixed but an update has not yet been released.
 Update to version x.y once it released.
 - comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how to reproduce etc)
 
 For the end user there could be the following scenarios:
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org finds a duplicate crash in
 it's database and will tell the
  user on how to proceed (see possible solutions above)
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org can't find an exact duplicate
 and will show the user
  all possible duplicates
 - user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a duplicate. User
 gets the possibility to
  subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a solution
 for his crash was entered
  by the developers
 
 One big difference in implementation I would propose:
 DrKonqi makes a *single* POST to crashes.kde.org including all
 information and then just shows
 a WebView where the server side can do anything. That gives greater
 independence of the used
 KDE version and changes on the server side.
 
 Advantages over current solution:
 - bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
 - crashes.kde.org can be specialized on crashes
 - sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that bug but
 also help the user by showing
  a solution for his issue.
 
 What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe a
 bugzilla installation or something
 custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.
 
 So, what do you think?
 Niko
 

Ubuntu has something similar iirc, same goes with the Linux Kernel project. (I 
recall hearing about it a couple years ago while at Google, so my memory could 
be a little fuzzy….)

--
Gary L. Greene, Jr.
===
Developer and Project Lead for the AltimatOS open source project
Volunteer Developer for the KDE open source project
See http://www.altimatos.com/ and http://www.kde.org/ for more information
===

Please avoid sending me MS Office attachments.

Re: DrKonqi improvement idea

2012-03-11 Thread henry miller
Good ideas, if anyone actually implements it. A couple of comments.

Most users are not programmers - they will not know how to recogize similear 
backtraces are the same root cause. Worse I know of many cases where I - a 
programmer - was wrong.

The more automated detection we can do the better. In fact many random crashes 
have been traced down to the same root cause, so we really need the ability to 
check the user's config in a distribution specific way. If some 
misconfiguration is found we can ignore the backtrace.

Keep privacy in mind as well.

Since I'm not offering to do the painting I'll step away from the bikeshed now.
-- 
Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Niko Sams niko.s...@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

I'd like to talk about an idea on how DrKonqi (which is a really
useful thing btw) could be
further improved.
In short: DrKonqi shouldn't create bugs directly but talk to a layer between.

DrKonqi - crashes.kde.org - bugs.kde.org

crashes.kde.org is a new web application - a bit similar to bugzilla:
- lists all reported crashes with intelligent filtering duplicates
- developers can set duplicates
- developers can link a crash to a bug (or create automatically a bug
for a crash)
- developers can enter a solution (that will be presented to the user
that hits this crash)
eg.:
- update to version x.y
- temporary workaround: don't click button x
- you missconfigured x, see http://y.com how to fix
- the developers are aware of this issue but have not yet fixed
it, see http://bugs.kde.org/... for details
- the bug is fixed but an update has not yet been released.
Update to version x.y once it released.
- comments can be added by users and developers (to ask how to reproduce etc)

For the end user there could be the following scenarios:
- user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org finds a duplicate crash in
it's database and will tell the
user on how to proceed (see possible solutions above)
- user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org can't find an exact duplicate
and will show the user
all possible duplicates
- user posts the crash, crashes.kde.org doesn't find a duplicate. User
gets the possibility to
subscribe to updates for this crash to get an email when a solution
for his crash was entered
by the developers

One big difference in implementation I would propose:
DrKonqi makes a *single* POST to crashes.kde.org including all
information and then just shows
a WebView where the server side can do anything. That gives greater
independence of the used
KDE version and changes on the server side.

Advantages over current solution:
- bugs.kde.org isn't filled with duplicates
- crashes.kde.org can be specialized on crashes
- sending a crash would not only help developers fixing that bug but
also help the user by showing
a solution for his issue.

What software could crashes.kde.org run? I'm not sure, maybe a
bugzilla installation or something
custom written. Or some other bugtracking software.

So, what do you think?
Niko