[Adium-devl] (no subject)

[Evan Schoenberg]

(cc: Adium development mailing list; please reply-to-all)

Slava,

We've been discussing the use of Smart Crash Reports for Adium, and I  
wanted to get your thoughts on two issues which came up.

Background: Adium currently uses its own crash reporter (overriding  
the crash signals and using a handler to launch the reporter).

1) We currently launch our crash reporter not only when a crash  
occurs but also when an unhandled exception is thrown, since  
unhandled exceptions nearly universally lead to undesirable  
behavior.  The NSExceptionHandling framework is used so we can report  
a stack trace for the exception [1]; exception crash reports are  
formatted just like normal OS X crash reports, including build  
number, OS X version, stack trace, and so on, with the addition of  
the exception's name and reason.  All this information is written by  
Adium to a text file; Adium then launches the Adium Crash Reporter  
and quits itself.

This amounts to an API request for SCR: could there be a function  
which allowed immediate launching of the reporter, pointing it to a  
specific crash log (or, in this case, exception log), so we could  
maintain this existing and extremely useful functionality while  
moving to SCR?

2) Statistics.  One of the biggest weaknesses of our current system  
is that there is no useful way to get crash statistics. A  
ridiculously powerful view, for example, would be a display of each  
unique crash (by crashlog), sorted by number of times that crash is  
reported.  More simple stats like a display of which modules have the  
most crashes reported, etc., would also be very helpful.  It's my  
understanding that this is part of how Apple makes the crash reports  
they receive more manageable.  Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Evan

[1] One of our developers, Mac-arena the Bored Zo, has written BSD- 
licensed code which performs this function; please let me know if  
this is something you'd be interested in seeing if you're unfamiliar  
with the process. 
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