abrt + X Error => zillions of duplicate bug reports?

[Michal Hlavinka]

On Tuesday 24 November 2009 22:49:53 Matěj Cepl wrote:
> Dne 24.11.2009 22:37, Adam Williamson napsal(a):
> >>> We came up with several possible courses of action. First, we
> >>> acknowledge that abrt team is working on improving duplicate detection,
> >>> but Matej noted that this is intrinsically hard work and abrt will
> >>> likely never be able to eliminate or even come close to eliminating
> >>> duplicate reporting.
> >>
> >> What's the technical limitation to coming close here?  It seems likely
> >> that there will be some edge cases, but I would think that the majority
> >> of cases aren't all that exceptional, and are fundamentally
> >> straightforward to work out.
> 
> Don't ask me, I am just a humble bug triager (putting abrt developer on
> CC of this message). What I can say is that even though I can see abrt
> devs work hard to eliminate duplicates, they don't succeed much.
> Apparently eliminating duplicates of bugs from beasts like Firefox or
> OpenOffice is excessively hard.

Afaik, there are several projects with some crash/exception handling on top of 
the stack. This makes it more difficult to find out where something actually 
crashed. I think solution to this is more plugins/individual configurations.

Something like /etc/abrt/conf.d/<package_name>.conf

with <package_name>.conf content something like this (of course with better 
format ;) :

refuseif()
{
  IF backtrace contains adobe flash THEN RefuseReporting("This crash is caused 
by proprietary blob, we can't fix it. Try to contact adobe");
  ELSE IF ....

  return OK;
}

cropbacktrace()
{
  remove <packagename>'s crash handler from top of the backtrace
}

And abrt will call these methods if they are defined.

Just my 2 cents

Michal