Re: Reducing "You found a bug" reports

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 21 Jul 2024 at 15:16, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

>>> I’m fine removing the “report a bug” message, maybe replacing it with
>>> some clearer diagnostic and suggestion?  WDYT?
>>
>> Could we detect if it comes from networking?  Somehow catch the error
>> and run some code that checks stuff and so report more “accurate”
>> messages?
>
> Someone™ would need to analyze some of the reports we have (some of them
> have already been commented on) to determine what happened and whether
> that is something we could diagnose differently.

Over the years, I have spent some time in answering to some of these bug
reports; see [1] for one instance of an attempt to be this Someone™ ;-).

More than often, the issue is transient, hard if not impossible to
reproduce and thus hard to analyze.  Even, when it happens for me,
sometimes I say ok let try to collect some information for helping in
debugging that but then just running again “guix pull” makes it pass.

Excluding the bug between the keyboard and the chair, most of the time
it seems coming from either user’s network, or either substitute
servers.  Most of the time the bang is transient.

Bah I do not know exactly what or how – otherwise I would have proposed
a patch or something ;-) – but I think we need to “instrument“ the
command “guix pull” in order to collect a trace for then diagnosing.

Somehow, maybe it could be a good application of Maxim’s proposal for
logging [2].

Well, instead of an “useless” backtrace, it would be more helpful to
have a kind of log or coredump; maybe something under /var/log/guix/.

I think the next step is not « Someone™ would need to analyze some of
the reports » because the reports often provide only the same “useless“
backtrace, so instead the next step seems: « Someone™ would need to
implement a better way for generating good reports ». ;-)

Cheers,
simon

1: collection of “guix pull“ bug reports
Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>
Wed, 23 Aug 2023 18:17:20 +0200
id:86jztl20of.fsf@gmail.com
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2023-08
https://yhetil.org/guix/86jztl20of.fsf@gmail.com

2: [bug#68946] [RFC PATCH 0/1] Add logging capability to Guix
Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com>
Mon, 05 Feb 2024 23:12:00 -0500
id:cover.1707192720.git.maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/68946
https://issues.guix.gnu.org/msgid/cover.1707192720.git.maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com
https://yhetil.org/guix/cover.1707192720.git.maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com