Behavior Trends in Nautilus and other Desktop Apps

[Jason Fletchall]

Dear Developers,

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project has made some interesting 
discoveries about the behavior (and misbehavior) of Nautilus and several 
other GNOME applications running under Fedora.  For those who have not 
heard of CBI, we instrument applications for users to download.  These 
instrumented binaries send us opt-in feedback data about branch 
coverage, exit status, etc.  For more information, check out the main 
CBI site here: <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/>.

For example, we have found that Nautilus 2.14 releases for Fedora 5 were 
buggy, with almost one run in ten crashing!  Subsequent releases of 
Nautilus 2.16 (Fedora 6) and Nautilus 2.18 (Fedora 7) have been much 
more stable.

Our CBI Early Findings pages, <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/findings/>, 
give more information about trends we have seen in Nautilus and other 
applications, including snapshots of the very latest CBI crash data.

These pages are just a small sample of what we could discover in the 
data, so we are eager to hear back from all of you.  If you have 
suggestions or requests for things we could look into, or if you have 
any questions or comments, contact us: 
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/contact/>.  We instrument lots of program 
actions, not just crashes, so we can also answer questions about feature 
use, code coverage, branch behavior, etc.

Also, the more users we have, the more accurate our findings!  If you 
want to become a part of the CBI community, simply download these 
packages: <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/>.

Jason Fletchall
University of Wisconsin-Madison