Tired of Useless bug reports? Dario to the rescue! && Bugday April 4-5 2009

[blauzahl]

You may have noticed a "Dario Andres" at the top of the bug-closer list for the last... well, a while now. I think he got tired of all the useless plasma backtraces, because he and George Kiagiadakis have been cooking up a rewrite of the crash dialog you get everytime something goes *boom

Comments

[anonymous]

Top !

[anonymous]

But please don't accidentally remove the optional "Debug with KDevelop" button. :)

The "Debug" option is still there

[ext_178721]

The "Debug" option (default debugger and Kdevelop ) is still present for the "developer" profile or if the "ShowDebugButton" option is setted on drkonqirc.
Dario Andres

[anonymous]

I think that crash-reports are never "worthless" to be reported.
A database of crash-reports can be very interesting for automatic tools.
Also some application developers have so few bugs that they would like to know about any crash. Maybe the backtrack is sufficient for them to pinpoint the problem.
However: users should clearly see that their "worthless" report will not be handled the same way as a useful report.
Finally: you should either provide ways to install debug information automatically or give distributions an _easy_ way to do that for you (for instance a script located at a specific location - let's say /usr/share/kde/distribution_debug_symbols.sh - that installs the debug symbols for a given application.)
Nice work, though.

[anonymous]

Just to make the "distribution_debug_symbols.sh" script more clear:
The crash-handler should invoke a script at a certain location (if it exists) if the debug symbols are not installed.
Distributions should replace this script with distribution-dependent code. The script could be as simple as dpkg-query followed by an apt-get, or it could be more sophisticated (with UI, etc).
Anyway: the effort for KDE would be minimal (just invoking the script) and in general it should not be too difficult for the distributions either.

[ext_175181]

Debug symbols have really nothing to do with users. If a backtrace can be generated for known builds of software, and then debug symbols can be added later, then the usecase should be supported where the user is on a limited resource machine which can't, or simply doesn't care to, install extra symbols. Devs should be the ones mapping addresses to symbol names, not users.

[ext_178721]

>>I think that crash-reports are never "worthless" to be reported.

There are some reports at bugzilla like "Dolphin crashed" with an unuseful backtrace and no description. And when you ask the reporter for more information you get no feedback :(

>>A database of crash-reports can be very interesting for automatic tools.

What do you think if I tell you : "automatic bugzilla reporting with automatic crash duplicate searching" ? :) That could be explained later

>>Finally: you should either provide ways to install debug information automatically or give
>>distributions an _easy_ way to do that for you (for instance a script located at a specific
>>location - let's say /usr/share/kde/distribution_debug_symbols.sh - that installs the
>>debug symbols for a given application.)

Yeah, we think about automatic debug symbols installation. I didn't thought of a script, I will look into the idea.

>>Nice work, though.

Thanks!

Some comments

[anonymous]

Screen 1 and 2 seem really good, thanks for making this process better

Re: Some comments

[ext_178721]

>>On screen 3, the stars and the green "OK" sign are confusing. Use one, not both. If you

The Note message

[anonymous]

There's a little something about the "Note" message. The first time I read it, I thought that "If you don't want to" referred to "close this window" (previous context) which is quite misleading.

Something like this would be better IMHO :
"You can now close this window, or file a bug report to help us improve KDE."

Even nicer, 'close this window' and 'file a bug report' could be 2 buttons with proper layout. Something like :

You can now :
[ Close this window ]
or:
[ File a bug report ] to help us improve KDE

It's a quite poor ascii-user interface mockup, but you get the idea.

Just some quick thoughts...
--
Tifauv'

Re: The Note message

[ext_178721]

>>There's a little something about the "Note" message. The first time I read it, I thought
>>that "If you don't want to" referred to "close this window" (previous context) which is
>>quite misleading.

>>Something like this would be better IMHO :
>>"You can now close this window, or file a bug report to help us improve KDE."

I already re-phrased that to "It is safe to close this dialog if you do not want to report"

>>Even nicer, 'close this window' and 'file a bug report' could be 2 buttons with proper
>>layout. Something like :
>>You can now :
>>[ Close this window ]
>>or:
>>[ File a bug report ] to help us improve KDE
>>It's a quite poor ascii-user interface mockup, but you get the idea.
>>Just some quick thoughts...
>>Tifauv'

We had some buttons on the main dialog widget but we removed them to get a cleaner layout.

Thanks for the ideas

Re: The Note message

[anonymous]

I agree this is an excellent idea. I've been waiting for a "restart application" button for years! I really hate that the option to automatically send bug reports was removed ages ago. Having to go to bugs.kde and click buttons before typing my bug report means I can rarely be bothered reporting a lot of bugs.

With regards to the language, I think you should do a few iterations with some other folk to make the language used more concise, more clear and less unfriendly. e.g.

"Are you willing to help the developers?" should be "Can the developers contact you for more information if required?".

Language like "You are not willing to help the developers" is very unfriendly and also unclear i.e. sending a report is helping. Change to "You do not want to be contacted about this report". I don't really understand the need for this screen though. Why not just open a window to bugs.kde?

Re: The Note message

[ext_178721]

>>With regards to the language, I think you should do a few iterations with some other