This week I’d like to highlight a very cool development: the automatic crash reporting facility in the Plasma 6 version of our venerable DrKonqi crash report wizard. Automatic reporting is opt-in, but so far lots of people are opting in, and we’re using this data to get a much better picture of the crashes that our users are actually experiencing than we ever could using Bugzilla! Using this system, at least three such important crashes were fixed this week, two by Fushan Wen (link 1 and link 2) and one by Vlad Zahorodnii (link)–and possibly even more than I missed!
Does this provide useful data for the devs without input from the user? I tend to not file bug reports because I’m quite terrible at making them and don’t want to waste dev time, accidentally putting them in the wrong place or the info I provide not being helpful etc.
I try to do my part by turning on all the user feedback to the highest level. This’ll be really nice to have on top of that if this is the case, and something I’ll definitely be enabling once I get Plasma 6 on my distro.
It definitely does. In fact I might even say it’s more useful than submitting a Bugzilla ticket about the crash, because with the new system, reports all get aggregated so we can see the true number of crashes. In addition, we get debug symbols automatically so there’s no back-and-forth with the reporter pointing them at a wiki page.
FWIW the automatic crash reporting is independent of the “user feedback” setting. You’ll have an opportunity to open into automatic crash reporting the next time you get a crash and see the DrKonqi crash reporting window. There’s a checkbox to opt in.
I was just presented with one of these automatic crash reporting dialogs, chose to send it, and then (after the fact, of course) was curious about what information I’d just sent in, so I went to see if I could locate the crash report online.
Following links in the first bug report from Nate’s blog post, I found that https://crash-reports.kde.org is only able to be logged into by “members of teams/kde-developers” on KDE Invent (GitLab), so the reports aren’t available to the public. I guess that’s good for privacy in general, as long as the sensitivity of historical records is taken into account if they ever decide to open it up.
I did find a blog post from Harald Sitter that includes some screenshots of what the developers see in these reports, if anyone else is curious: KDE Crash Tracking System 💣 | 💺 Blog