Talk:Features/CrashHandling

Apport

This plan obsoletes the old Apport plan - see Features/Apport.

Mailing List Discussions

May 2008: Apport - A general overview of technologies involved.

June 2008: apport/breakpad and fedora - Further refined after discussions at FUDCon.

Breakpad

We will probably want to package Breakpad for this. But there are a couple of problems:

1. It's already built into bug-buddy, so we get file conflicts
   • use %configure --program-prefix=%{name}- ...
2. It's not well-packaged - they don't install any of the headers needed for a -devel subpackage
   • Fix up the automake stuff, send patches upstream
3. It's designed soley for tracing the current process, so it's not useable as a separate crash-handler process
   • Write our own code to convert an ELF core to a minidump
     • Using their headers that define the minidump format
     • Contribute code back upstream
   • Or: "Fix" breakpad to allow dumping a different process
     • Breaks some of their assumptions (e.g. that the code will run inside the crashing process)
     • Might be outside the scope of the upstream project

Fwiw, if breakpad is packaged separately, we should certainly port bug-buddy to build against system-breakpad. But wouldn't apport or an equivalent solution obsolete bug-buddy anyway ?