Hello Mono maintainers,
there is quite a large number of automatic abrt bug reports for the
mono-core package. Unfortunately, we are way too few people to deal with
all of them and the actual content of these bug reports quite often not
sufficient to solve the problems.
Please can you have a look at the following proposal and tell me your
opinion?
Due to the automatic abrt bug reporting mechanism there are many bug
reports for the core mono package coming in. There are three major
problems with this:
1. There are more issues than the few maintainers can deal with. Since
it is quite easy to report a bug with abrt, there are many reports where
the reporter does not care too much (most time there is no description
how to reproduce the issues). If there would be fewer and more specific
bug reports, there would be a higher probability that these problems get
at least some attention.
2. Lots of the reported issues are caused by problems in the original
package (e.g. DllNotFoundExceptions etc.) and are not caused by bugs of
the mono runtime itself. This means, that all of these issues are not
assigned to the correct project and so the NVR of the executed mono
programs are not known. Additionally usually the output of the mono
process is important, because the backtrace of the managed code is not
included in the bug reports (e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=424805).
3. To make 2. even worse, I assume that the algorithm which checks for
duplicates in the backtraces does not work 100% correct for mono
backtraces and so issues of many different applications are migrated
into one bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=558857
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=605220
This alone makes it very hard to track these issues.
Sure, 2. and 3. can be solved by enhancing abrt. However it would not
help with the first item.
So I see two options here:
a) leave everything as it is
Fewer problems will be solved because it is hard to decide which
problems are really important and the maintainers are distracted because
of 2. and 3.. In reality, most of the automatic bug reports will be
ignored although the abrt tool gave the user the hope that somebody will
care about it.
b) turn off abrt for mono for rawhide, F-14, F-13, F-12
The maintainers can concentrate on problems for reporters which really
care about issues and so take the burden to file specific bug reports.
Nevertheless we should work together with the abrt developers to enhance
the automatic bug reports with respect to the issues described above.
The ultimate goal should be to re-enable the support when the backtraces
and duplicate detection are better (and there are probably again some
more mono maintainers).
I would certainly vote for b).
So what do you think? ;-)
Best regards,
Christian