[opensuse-project] Re: Fwd: Suse Bug Reporter - GSoC midterm report

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 1:19 PM, Michal Vyskocil wrote:

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 04:41:34PM +0300, Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur wrote:

...

Hello Michal,

This is the report I've sent to the mailing list.

Mihnea

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur Date: Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:39 PM Subject: Suse Bug Reporter - GSoC midterm report To: opensuse-project@opensuse.org

Hello everyone,

The expected/requested functionalities for the project are done. I'm talking about the CLI version of the tool. Its main functionalities are splitted in four categories at the moment: * aid - helps the user to determine which is the „suspected” package that causes a problem * gather - scans the system for relevant data to provide in a bug report or to someone that helps, via IRC let's say * query - search the Bugzilla instance for bug reports that fit given keywords and sorts them by relevance * submit - gets input from the user and submits the bug report to Bugzilla

Underlying nice stuff: * duplicate search - this feature was very wanted from what I could tell. I managed to implement it using a sorting by relevance of bug reports. From what I could see in the tests I've done, it works great. Also, it supports "excluded words" functionality. * get assignee + maintainers - I use data from the rpm and then get the relevant information via OBS, using it's python bindings, not the shell tool * check account - verifies that the user has a valid account and if so, it stores the user's credentials in a hidden file, base64 encrypted and pickled to make them not human readable; if the data is stored, the user isn't prompted again for username & password when interacting with bugzilla * globbing : when searching for a package, you can also do something like search for ' kde* ' and it will show you what packages match * searching local rpm database: it also looks in 'provides',  not only in 'name'

There are also some other things that I've implemented by necessity, but I think the ones listed above are the ones that deserve to be mentioned in this report.

Some sample usage for submitting is here [0].

You can find the repo here: [1]

There is more to the tool that I can think of right now, so if you got any questions, fire away!

I intend to do also a GUI version but I don't know what to use. Maybe if libYUI comes along nicely I could use it. What do you think?

I would postpone the gui version to the next GSoc and focus on the command line client first :).

...

Also, I'll research what I can do to have maybe the bug reporter pop up when something crashes. I'm thinking of listening for specific signals, like SIGSEGV. Any suggestions are welcome!

That's trivial - read man 5 core - there's a special file called /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern, which can be used for defining the default name of cores. You might add the /cores/core.%e.%p, which will created cores like /cores/core.mutt.5687. And you might check this dir using inotify.

An alternative approach is add the '| /usr/bin/susre-bug-reporter-crash-handler' and then the core will be sent to the standard input of such program. This has only one caveat, when your handler crasher, it will trigger and another handler run, which will very probably crashes as well, so the new handler will be executed, .... and you will end with the DOS on your system.

Ubuntu's Apport and Fedora's ABRT use this approach, so you might want to check https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport http://kerneltrap.org/node/14010 http://justlearningtoblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/enable-core-dump-files-in...

or simply google http://www.google.com/search?q=apport+core_pattern&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?hl=cs&q=abrt+core_patern&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

BTW: listening of SIGSEGV isn't so trivial, because only parent processes can do it reliable, so the core_pattern approach is much simpler. The only one think to do is where to setup - it's not the problem, after your program is packaged, the init script started on boot will do it.

I want to implement the crash-watch-feature via core_pattern and inotify. I guess in the C daemon that I will write (something like this [0]) I can have a system call to the bug reporter giving it the path to the core dump file and having that I can detect which package was it and attach the dump to the bug report. What do you think? Speaking of attach - python-bugzilla hasn't got the attach functionality implemented. I'm not sure I know how to implement it myself. I'm thinking something like - using the bugzilla XMLRPC and doing it via http somehow - documentation is here [1]. I don't know if this would be too 'dirty' and if there is a better way. Please let me know, I'm new to this kind of programming. :) One more thing - regarding what files / logs to attach when reporting against certain packages (i.e. Yast log for reporting against yast), I'm thinking of implementing some sort of application hooks (as Ubuntu's Apport calls it). That means a file for each app with a string that represents what to attach. Over this, I'd write a function that scans the folder for such files and checks if the package name in the report matches one of the respective files. If so, it attaches the corresponding log. If you can think of a better infrastructure for this, please let me know! Mihnea [0] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ubuntu-inotify/index.html - example C application [1] http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/html/api/Bugzilla/Attachment.html -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org