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Abrt (problem reporting window) shows no information about that type of crash.


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> if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records or crash dumps and you will never figure out why it crashed

On Fedora you can use ABRT (AKA Problem Reporting) to view logs and tracebacks of a component that has crashed, and report the problem via Bugzilla. Also, GNOME isn't a system component, Fedora would still work without it, but it would use a TTY terminal instead.


Windows users have been sending crash reports for decades and nothing happened.

the users have no idea what "crash report" means

Sorry to burst your bubble, but mainstream Linux distributions have been collecting crash reports for a looong time.

[1] https://errors.ubuntu.com/ [2] https://developer.fedoraproject.org/tools/abrt/about.html


I've never seen A/B testing used for crash reporting. Perhaps it could be used for this, but it's flabbergasting to me that you see it as only for crash reporting.

> Apport will notify you about the crash and offer to file it. Do that.

I wouldn't call it auto-reporting when the user has to agree first; consent is the sticking point. (Same for abrt) (granted, I should have been more precise and I suppose that is automated in a sense; I took "automatic" to mean "without asking")


Fedora's Automated Bug Reporting Tool (abrt) uses this to automatically produce crash reports, which you can sanitize and approve to post in a central location for developers. I imagine that Ubuntu does something similar.

AFAIK for example on Fedora this (ABRT) is opt in and only sends "thing crashed" if you opt in. You need to explicitly manually check and confirm a full crash dump before sending it, so really not anything being done without the user knowing, at least on Fedora.

Clickbait. One crash whose cause hasn't yet been completely analyzed doesn't prove anything.

Linux is the only modern OS I've used that doesn't have the capability to send crash reports back to the developers

Red Hat's abrt does that: https://github.com/abrt/abrt/

Using kdump, it can also report kernel panics. Kdump acts as a kernel that is executed after the main kernel panics. The fresh kernel has a clean state and can store the dump in a file system.

the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged

It's worse because it's not an automatic process. It's also better, because it doesn't require external dependencies like abrt and kdump -- it's part of the kernel.


Thanks though I don't know why none of the threads in the crash report have any stack traces. Unfortunately this doesn't look actionable. I'll have to ask someone to take another look.

It sends crash reports automatically.

I guess that's a feature it offers, but like most people I've used it solely for crash reporting.

We do not upload any information from crash reports unless you upload the report yourself. We only collect anonymous usage data, which you can opt out of.

It looks like this could have been discovered by simply having (anonymised) crash report telemetry? I don't know about others, but that sort of telemetry doesn't sound so bad.

> the term means nothing except "data about you".

No, crash reports are primarily data about the program, with very little if anything about you.


By 'crash reports' do you mean the kernel/host?

Would you mind linking to one of those crash reports?

If you would rather not do that in public, please feel free to e-mail me links: bzbarsky at mit dot edu.


Wouldn't that be useful for crash reporting?
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