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Date:      Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:59:53 +0100 (BST)
From:      Gavin Atkinson <gavin@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Ken Smith <kensmith@buffalo.edu>
Cc:        Bruce Cran <bruce@cran.org.uk>, src-committers@freebsd.org, John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org>, svn-src-head@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r212964 - head/sys/kern
Message-ID:  <alpine.LNX.2.00.1009231841500.23791@ury.york.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <1285253887.95760.33.camel@bauer.cse.buffalo.edu>
References:  <201009211507.o8LF7iVv097676@svn.freebsd.org> <4C9A1602.4020204@freebsd.org> <1285169017.64197.29.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk> <201009221558.27393.jhb@freebsd.org> <4C9A6EE6.5050301@freebsd.org> <20100922222441.00002f27@unknown> <1285253887.95760.33.camel@bauer.cse.buffalo.edu>

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On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Ken Smith wrote:
> The issues talked about so far all contribute to the reason for that.
> But one of the more basic gut reactions to it all is that the users
> want to be interested in helping with the debugging (even if just
> providing the requested info) for any sort of crash information
> to be useful.  And at the point we shift something from -current
> to -stable the percentage of people actively interested in participating
> in that sort of stuff flip.  The bulk of people using -current
> know it's risky and they do it out of some interest in debugging
> stuff.  The *bulk* of people using -stable are less interested or
> flat out not interested.  And have no clue what crash dumps are,
> may be challenged to notice partition-getting-full issues, etc.

I'm not sure I buy this argument, I'm afraid.  Part of the advantage of 
having all this done automatically on the as-shipped release media is that 
end users don't have to be interested in debugging - crashinfo(8) does 
most of the work for them.  There's no easy way to actually determine 
figures, but even if say only 10-15% of crashes can be diagnosed and 
corrected just from the output of crashinfo(8) then that's a huge win for 
the project as a whole. I'm guessing 10-15% is not unrealistic.

I appreciate the issue about filling partitions is a valid one.  Would a 
possible compromise be that on release media, crashinfo(8) or similar will 
default to only keeping the most recent coredump or similar?  Given /var 
now defaults to 4GB, Defaulting to keeping a single core is probably 
acceptable.

Gavin



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