Better Debugging Possibilities for Wine on Ubuntu

[Stephan Hermann]

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Dear Colleagues,

As Scott Ritchie knows, I'm at the moment the reponsible person for
Wine on Ubuntu.
I hope that you all know, Ubuntu has a new system for filing 
crash reports and stacktraces. (named apport aka automatic crash
reports, some documentation is found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport)

Those reports are working quite well for all apps in Ubuntu, but not as
expected for Wine, especially when windows apps are involved.

We discussed yesterday about this problem, and now we want your help,
to make things better.

What we need from you:

	- What do you need from us (Ubuntu) to get better backtraces
when wine crashes (especially wine-preloader)
	- How can we work together in a better way? (e.g. 
crashreport will be filed in launchpad (http://www.launchpad.net)
automatically, can we file a bugreport automatically in your
bugzilla?)
	- If yes, what information do you really need, what can we tell
the users, who are reporting those crashes, what they have to do to
fullfill your needs for the bugreport and debugging (e.g. try to
reproduce the crash while running wine in gbd, doing a backtrace with
bt full, or what so ever)

Finally, we would like to have more involvement of you, Wine
Developers, to make Wine a vital piece of software for Ubuntu. 

And now a little call for help to Scott Ritchie :)

Scott, we talked some time ago about having you in our MOTU team, for
maintaining not only debian/ubuntu packages at winehq, but also for
Ubuntu. 
We, the Ubuntu MOTU team, and I personally think, this would be quite
good having you on board. 
I know, that you are working hard on your packages, and we need your
help. If you want, please get in touch with me (email:
sh(a)sourcecode,de or jabber JID:sh(a)linux-server.org) and let's discuss
how we can get you easily in our MOTU team.

Thanks for your attention, 

Stephan aka \sh @ freenode.net
 
- -- 
Stephan Hermann
Ubuntu Developer
http://launchpad.net/~shermann
shermann(a)ubuntu.com
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[Marcus Meissner]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 09:18:00AM +0200, Stephan Hermann wrote:
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>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As Scott Ritchie knows, I'm at the moment the reponsible person for
> Wine on Ubuntu.
> I hope that you all know, Ubuntu has a new system for filing 
> crash reports and stacktraces. (named apport aka automatic crash
> reports, some documentation is found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport)
>
> Those reports are working quite well for all apps in Ubuntu, but not as
> expected for Wine, especially when windows apps are involved.
>
> We discussed yesterday about this problem, and now we want your help,
> to make things better.
>
> What we need from you:
>
> - What do you need from us (Ubuntu) to get better backtraces
> when wine crashes (especially wine-preloader)

We usually get a default wine backtrace using "winedbg --auto ..."

Can you show us some not so good backtraces by your tool?

Ciao, Marcus

[Stephan Hermann]

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Hi Marcus,

e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/90957

Please note, we can add more features to apport (Martin Pitt is the
maintainer).



Regards,

\sh
Am Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:52:08 +0200
schrieb Marcus Meissner <meissner(a)suse.de>:
> On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 09:18:00AM +0200, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Dear Colleagues,
> >
> > As Scott Ritchie knows, I'm at the moment the reponsible person for
> > Wine on Ubuntu.
> > I hope that you all know, Ubuntu has a new system for filing 
> > crash reports and stacktraces. (named apport aka automatic crash
> > reports, some documentation is found at
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport)
> >
> > Those reports are working quite well for all apps in Ubuntu, but
> > not as expected for Wine, especially when windows apps are involved.
> >
> > We discussed yesterday about this problem, and now we want your
> > help, to make things better.
> >
> > What we need from you:
> >
> > - What do you need from us (Ubuntu) to get better backtraces
> > when wine crashes (especially wine-preloader)
>
> We usually get a default wine backtrace using "winedbg --auto ..."
>
> Can you show us some not so good backtraces by your tool?
>
> Ciao, Marcus

- -- 
Stephan Hermann
Ubuntu Developer
http://launchpad.net/~shermann
shermann(a)ubuntu.com
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[Marcus Meissner]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 09:59:05AM +0200, Stephan Hermann wrote:
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>
> Hi Marcus,
>
> e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wine/+bug/90957
>
> Please note, we can add more features to apport (Martin Pitt is the
> maintainer).

The backtrace there is pretty useless.

With:
[Software\\Microsoft\\Windows NT\\CurrentVersion\\AeDebug] 1119019818
"Auto"="1"
"Debugger"="winedbg --auto %ld %ld"

in the registry Wine will call winedbg automatically on a crash and get
a Win32 aware backtrace.

It would already help to use wine-pthread instead of wine-preloader
for generating the backtrace. (Just replace it as traced binary.)

Ciao, Marcus

[Vitaliy Margolen]

Stephan Hermann wrote:
> - What do you need from us (Ubuntu) to get better backtraces
> when wine crashes (especially wine-preloader)

As Marcus mentioned the best trace you can get is from the Wine's own
debugger. Of course it would be even better with debug symbols installed
on the system.
> - How can we work together in a better way? (e.g. 
> crashreport will be filed in launchpad (http://www.launchpad.net)
> automatically, can we file a bugreport automatically in your
> bugzilla?)

I would say NO. Wine crashes all the time for a lots of reasons. Some of
those reasons have nothing to do with Wine itself. Some times they are a
result of the missing feature. Creating bug-report for each crash won't
help anyone, but will deplete resources of the server hosting bugzilla.

Looking at your test report, it's bug # 219 in Wine's bugzilla. No crash
report is require there. It's enough to see "secdrv.sys" and mentioning
of the ntoskrnl.exe.

In general the most useful pieces of information are ... complete
terminal output, $PWD and the command used to start an application. Also
the exact Wine version $(wine --version), and where did it came from
(self-compiled or binary). All of them are absent from the report.

Vitaliy.

[Stephan Hermann]

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Hi,


Am Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:11:28 -0600
schrieb Vitaliy Margolen <wine-devel(a)kievinfo.com>:
> Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > - What do you need from us (Ubuntu) to get better backtraces
> > when wine crashes (especially wine-preloader)
>
> As Marcus mentioned the best trace you can get is from the Wine's own
> debugger. Of course it would be even better with debug symbols
> installed on the system.
> > - How can we work together in a better way? (e.g. 
> > crashreport will be filed in launchpad (http://www.launchpad.net)
> > automatically, can we file a bugreport automatically in your
> > bugzilla?)
>
> I would say NO. Wine crashes all the time for a lots of reasons. Some
> of those reasons have nothing to do with Wine itself. Some times they
> are a result of the missing feature. Creating bug-report for each
> crash won't help anyone, but will deplete resources of the server
> hosting bugzilla.
>
> Looking at your test report, it's bug # 219 in Wine's bugzilla. No
> crash report is require there. It's enough to see "secdrv.sys" and
> mentioning of the ntoskrnl.exe.
>
> In general the most useful pieces of information are ... complete
> terminal output, $PWD and the command used to start an application.
> Also the exact Wine version $(wine --version), and where did it came
> from (self-compiled or binary). All of them are absent from the
> report.

That's one report generated by apport, which is, as you and others
were writing, totally useless (that was my first impression, too)

So, I'll go back to normal business for bugreporting and pointing the
users to winedbg.

Thx for all your answers :)

Regards,

\sh

- -- 
Stephan Hermann
Ubuntu Developer
http://launchpad.net/~shermann
shermann(a)ubuntu.com
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[Marcus Meissner]

> > In general the most useful pieces of information are ... complete
> > terminal output, $PWD and the command used to start an application.
> > Also the exact Wine version $(wine --version), and where did it came
> > from (self-compiled or binary). All of them are absent from the
> > report.
>
> That's one report generated by apport, which is, as you and others
> were writing, totally useless (that was my first impression, too)
>
> So, I'll go back to normal business for bugreporting and pointing the
> users to winedbg.

Again, if you can get it to run the backtrace with "wine-pthread" 
as binary, it will likely be better.

(gdb wine-pthread, attach pid, bt ... does show more)

I have however no clue how apport works and if this can be done there.

Ciao, Marcus

[Scott Ritchie]

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 07:11 -0600, Vitaliy Margolen wrote:
> In general the most useful pieces of information are ... complete
> terminal output, $PWD and the command used to start an application. Also
> the exact Wine version $(wine --version), and where did it came from
> (self-compiled or binary). All of them are absent from the report.

What's a good way to tell Wine it's running a binary package?  I don't
think we have that data yet, except maybe guessing from `which wine`
giving /usr or /usr/local

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie