Bug/Crash submission system

[and-81]

Hey krntea, it's good to hear from a fellow Aussie. I think we're over-represented in this field, but that's a good thing

Firstly, I do understand where you're coming from with this, I think we're really just looking at it from two different angles. You see the better debug information and say auto-submission is the key, I see a flood of really bad fault reports and worry. But I'll take the debug info any day!

Let me tell you where I agree with you:

1. Having proper debug info would be fantastic, I agree that it would help us a lot. How could I argue with that?

2. Statistical analysis of bugs, would also be great. No argument here.

I would take these things in a heart-beat. But you have to understand a few things about MediaPortal...

1. 95% of the work is done by 5% of the developers. That may be a little exaggerated, but you wouldn't believe the true figures if you saw them. It looks like a big team of people until you get into it and realise that most of the work is done by a dedicated few. And I really mean "few". NOTE: I don't pretend to be one of those few.

2. The end-user is, a lot of the time, "Joe average". We get a lot of really bad fault reports and increasing the number of bad fault reports will not help anyone.

My main point I guess is this:

I totally agree that having proper debugging information will help us, I just don't think that automatic submission and proper debug information have to come together or not at all. Give me the debug info, just not the auto-submission (for the reasons I've already spelled out).

Don't take this next bit as sarcasm, because it's not:

We are not Mozilla.

We're actually pretty small. One day MediaPortal might be big enough to look at this again and reach a different conclusion, I just don't think we're there yet. So I'm not poo-pooing the idea, I just don't think it will work here, now, yet.

Is that fair enough?

Cheers,

PS. Local time here is "crazy late", so don't be offended if I don't reply to anything here for about 12 hours.

[krntea]

infinityloop, I am sorry you have taken that reaction (Others who know me I hope would describe me as anything but arrogant, but it is ultimately besides the point). Re-reading my first post, I really fail to see where you got the idea from - I have demanded nothing. I have simply made an improvement suggestion based on experience and given examples, no more or less. Perhaps it was the idea itself.
I am not offended nor have anything personal against you, and we both want the same thing: an improved more stable MP. However YOU are a forum administrator as well as team leader and so you wield greater power than many others here that are also trying to contribute to the project. In the course of this simple idea you have (IMO unnecessarily) moved my individual posts between threads, and changed your posted replies afterwards: I think you have done this because you feel I am arrogant, and that I am demanding something, but the reason is not important. What is important is that it happened. Please try to take your power and responsibility more seriously, ease off on the trigger finger and try not to knee jerk react when you read peoples forums posts. Also and read up on the significant research done into how common it is to misread emotions in email: http://www.google.com/search?q=email...sunderstanding
Failing to do this, your attitude whether right or wrong, justified or not will chase away potential developers and anyone who has a good idea that does not fit with your own personal view of how the project should be run. From what I am hearing there are not many developers to start with, and so far I am not encouraged to leap over myself and join up.

[krntea]

Hi Aaron,
Unfortunately it is next to impossible to have crash/hang debugging info submissions unless they are generated automatically and at the moment a crash occurs. You can't ask end users to understand how to generate debugging dumps sometime after the crash happens. So usually when MP crashes, debugging dumps and needed info can be generated and the option to send them, or not.

I do get the feeling from yours and other "official" replies above that a conclusion has been jumped to about what exactly such a crash submission is, but at the same time the comments show that there is a lack of understanding about what it is, what it involves or how it works in production environment. It makes more sense to use such a system when only 5% off developers are active, not less. It saves time and improves stability, not less. There are many projects out there of all shapes and sizes to use as an examples, I just chose some people were sure to have heard of - you do not need to be Mozilla. One man bands are more suited to this than Mozilla is.

However its probably best I leave it there. I am not trying to ram this simple idea down your throats or anything :-). I have only wanted to open up the idea for consideration. Informed consideration that is, not "oh thats just emailing the logs and system info automatically, we considered that, no thanks". Thats just incorrect and mis-informed.
I have been on enough developer teams by now to know how it works - who know's maybe we worked together at some point in Aussie, going by the sound of your work summary :-).

Have a good one,
Keith.

[patricon]

Hi again, krntea i'm 100% agree with you and the way as you have expressed your opinion about the bug reporting system. Now i understand why MediaPortal project is like it's... to talk with infinityloop is like talking with a wall (translation of a spanish popular phrase), i've also been working with automated bug reporting systems, as i told you before ,in my vast experience (more than 15 years now) as developer i've finally created my bug submission system (very simmilar to the one that you have linked) and a single automated report is MUCH MORE valueable than any detailed explanation from end user... in my crash report i can see all variables, stacks and trace the exact point in the code where the problem occurs. This with media portal logs are not possible, you can see here, for example my conversation with Paranoid Delusion http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/te...os-t24876.html . in that thread i've tried to report a bug, but after a few days and a lot of words, and a lot of time wasted by Paranoid Delusion he can't already find the bug and repair it. The log is not sending enought information, and also my fault due to my limited english... It's a pity that finally your great idea (like many others that i've saw around here in all this time) will be losed like tears in the rain (yes, i love blade runner..hahaha) ..

As i told before, if mp is where it's is thanks to people like infinityloop and his attitude about the critics, suggestions and ideas... what a pitty.

best regards!

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by patricon

Now i understand why MediaPortal project is like it's... to talk with infinityloop is like talking with a wall

erm.... seems like some of you still not understand that i tell you what the team decided and why....

Originally Posted by krntea

In the course of this simple idea you have (IMO unnecessarily) moved my individual posts between threads, and changed your posted replies afterwards: I think you have done this because you feel I am arrogant, and that I am demanding something, but the reason is not important.
What is important is that it happened. Please try to take your power and responsibility more seriously, ease off on the trigger finger and try not to knee jerk react when you read peoples forums posts.
Also and read up on the significant research done into how common it is to misread emotions in email: http://www.google.com/search?q=email...sunderstanding
Failing to do this, your attitude whether right or wrong, justified or not will chase away potential developers and anyone who has a good idea that does not fit with your own personal view of how the project should be run. From what I am hearing there are not many developers to start with, and so far I am not encouraged to leap over myself and join up.

some ppl are realy confusing me......

you as a developer should know that a bugreport should stay on the subject.
you hijacked your own report by starting to talk about your improvements suggestion to get more attention.

i tried to clean up YOUR bugreport, so it stays READABLE and USEFUL so you finaly may get some HELP regarding YOUR issue.

Thats the reason why i moved your OFF-TOPIC POST to this thread where it belongs to.

Keep in mind that in the most other communities/forums off-topic post are DELETED WITHOUT A WARNING.

I avoid that as good as possible.

Its realy interesting that you still try to teach us...... Or is it just me who gets that impression?

You raised your suggestion, and now we told you that we dont want automatically submitted reports, as we allready decided that quite some time ago.
we also shared our reasons.

But you still try to convince us to do what you think is best?

One last time i ask you now.
Why do you demand that this crash dump has to be send automatically to a "collection service"?
Where do you personaly have the problem when this crash dump is stored localy and then attached by the user to his full scale bugreport?

We have been thinking about such dump logs, but until now noone was able/had the time to introduce em.

Thats cool about opensource on the one hand you hear ppl screaming "stability" on the other hand the "feature request" are growing like hell (gimme, gimme, gimme).

only a few stand up and try to actively work something out. its a shame.





At the end we might have to agree that we do not agree

Or maybe patricon and krntea would like to contribute to MediaPortal and use their knowledge to add a crash dump and/or "one click log-export facility"?

because THAT would then be helpful.

[Laban]

Where do you personaly have the problem when this crash dump is stored localy and then attached by the user to his full scale bugreport?

To me, this sounds like a much better idea. I would only want an automatic fetch of the system information (cpu, motherboard.. and so forth, if possible) and perhaps something that grabs the last 100-n lines of the logfile so that i wouldn't have to do that boring work myself. Then let the user add the bugreport description manually.

[infinityloop]

Originally Posted by Laban

To me, this sounds like a much better idea. I would only want an automatic fetch of the system information (cpu, motherboard.. and so forth, if possible) and perhaps something that grabs the last 100-n lines of the logfile so that i wouldn't have to do that boring work myself. Then let the user add the bugreport description manually.

sadly there is no way to fetch all system informations from your PC when creating a bugreport thread.
that could then become a problem when you start your report on an other PC

you have to add your systemspecification once in the usercp. it is then automatically pasted to every bugreport or support thread

we have a test-tool for MediaPortal which automatically clears all logs befor a test and exports all after the test is done into a zip file.
"problem" is that this tool needs a update..... sadly the developer of it is a bit short of time.

we plan since quite some time to integrate a feature into MediaPortal which allows the user to export all logfiles (in case of a crash also a crash dump) into one zip file with one mouseclick.
the user only has to attach this file to the detailed bugreport then.

sadly we have the same problem there. developers have to take care about more importan issues in the sparetime they have available to work on MediaPortal.

[tomtom21000]

Hi Keith, I really appreciate your idea. I can´t really judge on the pro´s and con´s as I am no developer. But I´d like to raise some points:

# From my experience and from reading the forums on a daily basis for a long time, crashes are rare in MP. They may occure more frequently with the tve3 which i don´t use so far. I had like 5 crashes the past two years with MP. Note that I update svn very often, that I have installed about 15 plugins, test new ones often and change skins frequently. I allways install over the last one and do all this on my productive htpc environment. I filed a lot of bug reports over the time, but 95% are about bugs in functionality, navigation etc.

If this is not only my perception, but true, the value of a crash report system comes down to a question of efficiancy.

# I never sent a crash report to MS, and I didn´t install the quality assurance tool from firefox. call it paranoia. Maybe my personal view.

# The htpc scene is still a domain of computer geeks. I estimate 90 % have something having to do with computers as a profession. So you have a good chance to get some meaningful bugreports on a forum system (I bet infinityloop doesn´t agree ). I think having a report "do Step1, Step2, Step3 -> bug" helps a lot like aaron said. I could imagine that doing that was related or even necessary to produce the bug is important to know. Could you know that from an auto bug report?

# Could you tell from the reports, which belong to the same bug? Would there be an easy way to detect that they all use a certain filter or hardware? Not easy on forum reports either. Could be a plus if possible.

Not speaking for or against it, I am in no position to do so. But if this suggested system was only helpful in a minority of the bug scenarios (crashes), it is really a question of the cost/gain-ratio.

tomtom

[dman_lfc]

Hi,

Interesting read and I think alot of thoughts have been shared here. Please all chill on the attitudes though.

I will summarise & share my thoughts if I may...

A bug collection idea is good however this is what we need before it can be seriously considered...

1. A coder or two to work on it - anyone with passion here keen? Krntea / Patricon???

2. Auto filtering non MediaPortal related crashes. i.e. The crash is not caused by the MediaPortal code space. Can you do this???

The reason why I ask is I have handled many crashes in the past and although MediaPortal may be the catalyst it's usually a driver bug, or a codec issue, or OS. I would go as far as saying that 95% of crash reports are unlikely to be MediaPortal code related.
Example: Nvidia 165.01 beta drivers crashes MP coming out of standby - now we don't want all users who start using a beta driver automatically sending us bug reports when it's Nvidia's fault.

So when I say Autofiltering can it be programmed that when a crash occurs it reports back to the user what is likely to be the fault if outside MediaPortal and a likely fix without sending a report? I'm keen to have something like Microsoft do.

3. A hybrid approach which captures user data before being able to send the information. i.e. Dump, MediaPortal / TVServer logs, system info, and a pre-defined user entries of which they cannot submit until information is entered.

I certainly hope someone can step up to the task here.

DMAN

[patricon]

I surrender, the mp team as a rock head... i must shut up my sincere opinion because i don't want to continue a flame. infinityloop... go doctor, you can already get a cure for your problem... mp could be light years ahead thant actually it's but after more than two years, it's still in the same point, still buggy, still tearing problem to play videos, still no standards in user interface (and this cause that A LOT of skins where abandoned) and still a lot of work with tv cards that i think that is the least important thing in a media center. I really hope that soon a really good programmers team could began a serious project for a decent media center. I have no time, because if i could have more time i'll began to work about this... i've seen a lot of simmilar discussions like this, here, in the past... people like vanessa... that leaves this project when she saw how are the things here... good ideas are crashed here....

have a nice day Illfinity Loop