Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 145949
Stack traces: no practical way to get them to Redhat
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:59 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: When a crash occurs in the anaconda installer, a stack trace is printed to the screen. This is useless to the end user, as it cannot be cut and pasted and submitted to bugzilla. An option is given to save the stack trace to a floppy disk, but as it's 2005 and nobody used floppy disks any more this option to longer works. What should happen is that the stack trace be delivered over the internet direct to bugzilla via email, querying the user for an alternate MTA if necessary to do so. Adding this will mean that the highly unreliable anaconda installer will have its first shot at being meaningfully stable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora Core 3 disk 1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: xxx Additional info:
When a stack trace occurs, the complete text of the trace (and all sorts of other information) may be found in /tmp/anacdump.txt on the system you are trying to install onto. You can switch over to a console with ctrl-alt-f2 and use scp to transfer the dump to another machine. From there, you can use a web browser or do whatever else to get the stack trace to us.
And the user is supposed to know this how? The crash screen needs to be updated to tell the user a) that the backtrace can be found in this file; and b) that a network connection is actually present to do the transfer; and c) what tools are available to them to achieve this Do not assume that the user knows what the anaconda author knows. Unless you tell the user these things, there is no way they can be expected to know. The very high failure rate of anaconda shows clearly that the bug reports are not getting through to Redhat. Marking this as "not a bug" does not improve the user experience, please fix this before marking this bug as closed.