On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 12:01 +0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> I specifically added this feature because we get a *lot* of crash
> reports which happened on packages which are out of date. The big
> problem is that this often means that these crashes cannot be 'retraced'
> any more, i. e. we cannot get a symbolic stack trace because we do not
> have the old package versions and their debug symbols any more.

Well, the brute-force fix for that is more disk space to keep a longer
history of -dbgsym packages, but I understand what you are saying.

> So even if you only have an outdated library which is not directly
> responsible for the crash, there is still little value for us to get
> those crash reports.

I disagree.  The only packages which really need to be up to date are
packages that directly affect the stack trace of the given crash.  Even
completely missing dbgsym packages for everything except what is in the
stack trace should not affect the quality of the crash report.

But given a reasonable history of past -dbgsym packages (even if it's
only a few days) then a crash report for something that has packages
that may be only a day or two out of date is still very quite useful.

With apport currently, it's not reporting any of my crashes simply
because I don't update my system multiple times a day.  This makes
apport pretty useless in the devel branch.

> We should prevent users from uploading tons of data
> in vain.

I would suggest in fact that this weeding out of useless reports belongs
on the backend (at launchpad) not at the frontend.  Maybe there should
be some handshake before an entire report is uploaded which sends
package versions from the crash-on-hand up to LP and LP responds back
with whether the report will still be useful or not.  But even still, as
I talked about above, a package without a -dbgsym doesn't really matter
if it doesn't affect the stack trace, so even this handshaking will be
needlessly throwing away crash reports.  It's better than what is
happening currently though where apport is throwing away every report.

b.

-- 
My other computer is your Microsoft Windows server.

Brian J. Murrell

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fails to upload if packages are out of date
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/122818
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