Features/ABRTBacktraceDeduplication

ABRT Backtrace Deduplication Service

Summary

Backtrace deduplication service solves the problem of many duplicate crash reports being submitted by ABRT to Red Hat Bugzilla. It is designed to help ABRT users to find duplicate reports before filing a new bug, and to help package maintainers to triage/reassign/merge already reported bugs.

Backtrace deduplication server is a collection of newly-developed tools that will be deployed on the retrace server hardware, which is a part of Fedora infractructure. ABRT will contain a client tool and integration with the server.

Owner

• Name: Karel Klic
• Email: kklic at redhat.com

• Name: Michal Toman
• Email: mtoman at redhat.com

• Name: Miroslav Lichvar
• Email: mlichvar at redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 17
• Last updated: 2012-01-17
• Percentage of completion: 60%

Benefit to Fedora

1. Red Hat Bugzilla receives a lot of duplicate crash reports from ABRT clients, even for a single component. This makes ABRT reports less useful and causes developers to give ABRT reports lower priority. Red Hat Bugzilla receives a lot of low-quality reports, which should be closed without intervention from maintainers. For example, the simple-scan component is very affected by low quality of ABRT: many of its bug reports are duplicates, and some reports are incorrectly showing __libc_message and similar functions as crash functions.
2. Red Hat Bugzilla contains multiple crash reports filed on end-user applications, that are caused by a single bug in a library. The crash reports are then analyzed multiple times by various developers, and that wastes their time.

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to ABRT using duphash Bugzilla search mechanism.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/ABRTBacktraceDeduplication