Test Day:2009-08-20 ABRT

What to test?
Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on Automated Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT). This tool should help non-power users with bug reporting, making it as easy as a few mouse clicks. ABRT is a daemon that watches for application crashes. When a crash occurs, it collects the crash data (core file, application's command line etc.) and takes action according to the type of application that crashed and according to the configuration in the abrt.conf configuration file. Bottom line: do not hunt the bugs with a pitchforks, rather use bugzappers/big light source to draw them from the dark and kill them easily at close range.

ABRT should be easy for users and very useful for developers and admins. Ease of crash/bug reporting and quick response from maintainers based on info from ABRT should make Fedora more stable and thus more attractive for users.

Who's available
The following people will be available for testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion:
 * Development - Zdeněk Přikryl (zprikryl), Jiří Moskovčák (jmoskovc)
 * Quality Assurance - David Pravec (dpravec), Kamil Páral (kparal), James Laska (jlaska), Michal Nowak (mnowak)

What's needed to be able to test

 * A system with some kind of network connection
 * Fully updated Rawhide or Fedora 11 installation with ABRT installed or special ABRT TestDay Live image (i686 or x86_64)

How to install ABRT
If you do not use the provided LiveCD, but you use your own Fedora 11 or Rawhide installation, you need to install latest ABRT packages by running following commands:

First add correct repository: curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/abrt.repo http://jmoskovc.fedorapeople.org/abrt.repo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/abrt-rawhide.repo http://jmoskovc.fedorapeople.org/abrt-rawhide.repo
 * Fedora 11:
 * Rawhide:

Now install/update ABRT: su rm -f /var/cache/abrt/abrt-db yum remove kerneloops yum install abrt-desktop reboot

Please do not forget to reboot. It's needed after installing ABRT.

Live Image
Optionally, you may download a non-destructive rawhide live image for your architecture with latest ABRT pre-installed. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD. For Fedora on USB flash disk consult FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo.

Test Cases
Follow each of following ABRT Test Cases and sum up the results in the tables below. Report your findings also in Bugzilla or ABRT Trac (enter FAS username/password). Please provide links to bugreports in results table.


 * 1) QA:Testcase_ABRT - default crash report
 * 2) QA:Testcase_ABRT_Logger - Logger plugin
 * 3) QA:Testcase_ABRT_Bugzilla - Bugzilla plugin
 * 4) QA:Testcase_ABRT_Mailx - Mailx plugin
 * 5) QA:TestCase ABRT BlackList - package blacklist
 * 6) QA:Testcase ABRT GPG check - reporting crashes of signed packages only
 * 7) QA:TestCase ABRT GPG Keys - additional keys for signing packages
 * 8) QA:Testcase ABRT Actions and Reporters - testing of action/reporting plugins
 * 9) QA:Testcase ABRT Cron - periodical plugins using Cron
 * 10) QA:Testcase ABRT Plugins - configuring plugins
 * 11) QA:Testcase ABRT CLI - CLI interface
 * 12) QA:Testcase ABRT kernel - kernel oops
 * 13) QA:Testcase ABRT python - python tracebacks

Known issues
Consult list of active tickets before reporting an issue. The most common issues are listed below:
 * Applet (or other icons) in notification area is not visible - that's a known bug in Rawhide, please try to run  and reload it a few times, it may help
 * Recreate report for same crash - if you want to recreate a report of same crash, you have to delete it using button in GUI and make a crash gain
 * Nothing happened? - if it seems to do nothing, try to disable PGP checking and restart daemon
 * Graphical warnings - gui writes some gtk warnings (it's gtk's fault)
 * rpm %requires - it needs rpm >= 4.7.0-1
 *  bug-buddy or other crash catching tools might take precedence over ABRT if you are using them. ABRT will catch only crashes which are not caught by other tools.
 * Cannot catch OpenOffice.org, KDE and Java - these applications have a built-in method for capturing failures so it is the same as with BugBuddy etc.
 * if you're updating from version <= 0.0.5-6 - make sure you remove /var/cache/abrt/abrt-db (we've changed the db format and not yet implemented automatic updating mechanism)'''
 * GUI doesn't inform you about success of failure of a reporting. - But you can find results in ABRT's db (default path /var/cache/abrt, it is sqlite3 db, table name is "abrt") - it should be fixed, but in case it's not try to look for these files

Issues that were identified
Don't report duplicates, thanks :) Just write a comment to the bugzilla that you have also noticed the bug.