Today I noticed that GNOME’s bug-buddy crash reporter has become almost self-aware. The SoundJuicer audio ripper crashed (first time for me, and not reproducable). Bug-buddy reported the bug (without asking me for any sendmail nonsense), then showed me a clickable URL link to my bug. The magic:
- It was actually not a new bug. It was an old bug, which bug-buddy/bugzilla had automatically identified as a duplicate, probably by comparing the stack trace. The comments in the bug report mentioned that it was actually caused by musicbrainz, but that musicbrainz fixed it in a later version. I added a comment about distros needing to update their musicbrainz version for the next person who finds themselves there.
- A few seconds later, bugzilla sent me an email saying
“
You recently submitted a bug report to GNOME Bugzilla using Bug-Buddy.
Thank you for reporting this bug. This is actually caused by musicbrainz (used by sound-juicer). See for more information:
http://bugs.musicbrainz.org/ticket/2262
“
That’s amazing.
In my news this morning, I read that google came out with some sort of bug reporting tool as well, that works (so far) on win and apple and coming soon to linux.. I couldn’t help but think of bug-buddy when I was reading it. I’m not sure as to the differences.. http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2006/12/programs-crashing-airbag-helps-you_21.html is the link.
Yes, it is in our plans to use bug-buddy + airbag in some (most common) situations:
http://live.gnome.org/ImprovingDebugging
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388441