svn commit: r197065 - in stable/8: etc/defaults lib/libc/stdlib sys/amd64/conf sys/i386/conf sys/ia64/conf sys/pc98/conf sys/powerpc/conf sys/sparc64/conf

[Jason J. Hellenthal]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:00 -0000, rwatson wrote:

>
> On Thu, 10 Sep 2009, Remko Lodder wrote:
>
>> I agree with that; it would (!) help the bugbusting team in gathering 
>> required information. If there is an way to automate crashdumps and proper 
>> reporting and stick that in /var/crash/crash.$date or something and tell 
>> people that they can report their problems on the bugs list where needed, 
>> we have information upfront. I still remember the time where we had to 
>> chase people to get this information, sometimes never being able to 
>> properly get the information. If it is there by default, it will help.
>> 
>> Please consider keeping it enabled..
>
> Well, John's crashinfo(8) tool from Yahoo! does all this, the only "problem" 
> is that it requires extracting the crashdump to a local file system.  It 
> seems like we have a lot of the right ingredients, maybe we can have a 
> brain-storming session on distributed diagnostics and debugging at the 
> Devsummit on how to find some better middle grounds here.
>
> Robert N M Watson
> Computer Laboratory
> University of Cambridge
> 
>

If I may, I would like to introduce a distributed targeting system to this 
conversation in addition to crashinfo. Given with the above conversations I cant 
help but think that in a case like this it would be helpful to setup a central 
database for collection of information and write a little bit more code into 
crashinfo for uuencoding a blob to send through email or maybe another way so 
data can be collected, sorted & analyzed with statistics spilled out into a web 
page for review.

A rough overview of enabling this would be done through a rcvar that would 
auto-enable crash dumps, crashinfo & the reporting system together. As for the 
client ( does not exist yet. or maybe there is something similar ). But this 
would be just a opt-in type of rcvar that should be enabled by default for 
-CURRENT possibly -STABLE but off for all -RELEASE.

I would like to think that something like this would certainly improve 
development by help programmers focus specifically on areas that need attention 
while not having to hunt down core dumps for specific circumstances. And mostly 
amazing at the number of people that are willing to turn these things on.

RFC???

Best regards

PS: I most certainly would love to volunteer whatever I could do to make this 
happen.

-- 

  Jason J. Hellenthal
  http://www.DataIX.net/
  jasonh at DataIX.net
  0x691411AC

  - (2^(N-1))