[Libreoffice-qa] How Can I Provide More Info For Developers

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Julien,

On Fri, 2012-09-07 at 14:47 -0700, julien2412 wrote:
> First backtrace are very useful only if they contain symbols.

	Well - not -entirely- true, some backtrace is better than nothing at
all, but to have much hope of going wrong we need a symbols trace - yes.
Why is that ? without symbols the debugger has to guess from offsets
from public functions for which the run-time linker needs names: what
does that mean - it means that the stack trace can easily have entirely
the wrong function names in them ;-) even with a function name - without
a line number there could be dozens of possible causes of a crash so ...
this make things -much- more useful.

> It seems no daily builds contain symbols or missed it
> (http://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/).
> It's more complicated to compile on Windows (a little less for MacOs)

	Yes - we can't ask QA guys to do that, it would be unreasonable.
Fridrich is working on a Windows symbol server: Fridrich - how is that
going ?

> As a simple QA contributor, I think preserving time of Devs is very
> important, more important than QA people time, because:

	Thanks for helping out ! but of course, we want to help preserve QA
time as well, so we're working on the symbol issue to make things better
and quicker for everyone.

> The fact is we can't guess in general the computer skill of a reporter so we
> can only ask politely these info by giving him/her the links quoted above.
> It can't be an offense or a scarecrow to ask technical info to people ! :-)

	Yep.

On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 16:11 +0200, Alex Thurgood wrote:
> Just to add my support for Julien's request :
...
> And for Mac too please :-)
> 
> It always seems to me to be such a pointless exercise running gdb as
> a QA member against daily builds that have no symbols.

	Right; so I believe Norbert was/is going to tweak his tinderbox to
provide builds with symbols.

> If the project devs want more QAers to test the daily builds and
> produce backtraces, then we need those symbols. Expecting QAers to
> have their own build environments is just asking too much for most
> people who do QA as spare time filler.

	Yep - right :-) unfortunately the windows situation is
hyper-complicated wrt. the symbol server setup, and a download with all
symbols is too huge to package / up-load and expect people to install
IIRC. Hence we're blocking on Fridrich there.

	HTH,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot