[Adium-devl] Looking at Smart Crash Reports redeux

[Evan Schoenberg]

On Jan 13, 2006, at 3:20 PM, Mac-arena the Bored Zo wrote:
>
> 	(1) an exception is still a crash in the user's book.
Actually, it generally isn't -- it's a problem, but it's very rarely  
as severe as a crash except in Adium where we escalate it to  
equivalency with a crash.

> and we still ought to fix it.
Absolutely.  If it's impossible to get exception crash reports, that  
will just mean that when unexpected behavior is reported we ask for  
the Console output while the behavior occurs to verify that an  
exception isn't being thrown.  If it is, gdb remains equally useful  
for finding backtraces of exceptions -- higher threshold for users  
being helpful, but we have a lot of users.

> we should see if there's a way to make Smart Crash Reports work  
> with exceptions.
Totally agree -- I'm emailing Slava Karpenko of Unsanity and will cc  
the dev list.

> (if they want code for this, there's BSD-licensed code in LMX's  
> test app for it.)
I just checked out the code in question -- I believe this is code  
that an application wishing to send out exception logs would use  
rather than something that would be used in SCR.

> 	(2) occasionally, we have had to contact a reporter asking for  
> more information. it hasn't happened often, but it has happened,  
> and I'd like to keep that ability.
It hasn't happened often is a key phrase there.  We can specify what  
default phrase is placed in the description text box of the SCR  
dialogue; I think a reasonable compromise would be to include  
something like:
"Please provide the best description you can of what Adium was doing  
when this crash occurred, preferably including exact steps to  
reproduce the crash.  If you want us to be able to contact you  
regarding your crash, include your email address, which will never be  
used for any purpose except Adium crash reporting."

> 	(3) just because it happened on Panther doesn't mean we can't fix  
> it. and we should fix it as long as our minimum isn't Tiger.
Sure... but using SCR doesn't invalidate our other bug reporting  
methods.  We're dropping Panther users down in crash-reporting  
functionality to the level of 99% of OS X apps... if they want to  
report to us a crash they need to send us the crash log.

-Evan
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