BugBuddy++

Currently GNOME pops up the GNOME Bug-Buddy when something crashes, this provides three options: Restart Application, Close Application and Report to Developers.

Paste in a screenshot here

The Reporting mechanism is a bit unhelpful and one of the first questions asked is what package the program that crashed came from. This information should be automatically worked out and the user should not be asked such questions.

• http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2006-January/014582.html

Program to track down the debian source package from a running process id:

• http://www.paul.sladen.org/ubuntu/bug-buddy/find-source-package.sh

It should ideally just ask for the email (which can be requested from Gnome's About Me) and keep that cache.

Submission should be via HTTP as this is more likely to be working than an email configuration.

Possibly the report generation and the sending should be decoupled. For instance if X crashes the data should be captured and then the notifier present a dialogue to the user at a later point confirming whether they would like to send the reports.

Mozilla calls this functionality 'full-circle'.

Ximian had some patches for GNOME bug-buddy that enable sensible reporting back to them---are these any use.

GNOME upstream are intending to add functionality to the main GNOME code-base for an XML-configured XML-RPC upload mechanism.

If the user doesn't have a launchpad account this should request one for them and send the user an automatically generated password by email. (What if the user supplies a fake email address, presumebly the information should be disgarded).

The user-interface component can prompt for the last thing the user remembers they were trying to do before the crash happened (eg. I closed Totem and X crashed into an infinite loop).

The KDE traceback code is in a program called 'drkonqi'.

Data:

• Program traceback
• Installed dependancy package versions
• link to hwdb data

The build-daemons could keep a copy of the symbols file used when building a package and save these so that tracebacks/stack dumps can be automatically and remotely decoded.

Given an option to make a HardwareDatabase link for the machine's specification. Connect up to LaunchpadIntegration too.

Give the user an option to see all the information that will be submitted (MS Windows has this and helps the privacy option).

Make the traceback collection and reporting into a daemon, then have separate KDE and GNOME front ends, this will allow collections on all sorts of crashes, particularly daemon crashes that would not normally be reported---and provide a uniform report regardless of the window manager that the user is using.