Test Day:2009-08-20 ABRT

DATE	TIME	WHERE
2009-08-20	From 12:00 to 21:00 UTC (8am - 5pm EDT, 14:00 - 23:00 CET)	#fedora-qa (webirc)

What to test?

Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on Automated Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT). This tool should help non-power users with bug reporting, making it as easy as a few mouse clicks. ABRT is a daemon that watches for application crashes. When a crash occurs, it collects the crash data (core file, application's command line etc.) and takes action according to the type of application that crashed and according to the configuration in the abrt.conf configuration file. Bottom line: do not hunt the bugs with a pitchforks, rather use bugzappers/big light source to draw them from the dark and kill them easily at close range.

ABRT should be easy for users and very useful for developers and admins. Ease of crash/bug reporting and quick response from maintainers based on info from ABRT should make Fedora more stable and thus more attractive for users.

Who's available

The following people will be available for testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion:

• Development - Zdenek Prikryl Jiri Moskovcak
• Quality Assurance - David Pravec, Kamil Páral, James Laska

What's needed to be able to test

• A system with some kind of network connection
• Fully updated Rawhide or Fedora 11 installation with ABRT installed or special ABRT TestDay Live image (i686 or x86_64)

How to install ABRT

Latest ABRT is included in Rawhide, but if you have Fedora 11, you first need to configure additional ABRT yum repository. <FIXME: add here link to howto add this public repo!>

su
yum erase kerneloops 
yum install abrt-desktop
reboot

Please do not forget to reboot. Its needed once after installing ABRT.

Live Image

Optionally, you may download a non-destructive rawhide live image for your architecture with ABRT pre-installed. Tips on using a live image are available at FedoraLiveCD.

Architecture	SHA256
[FIXME i686]	FIXME
[FIXME x86-64]	FIXME

How to test

Test Cases

Follow each of following Category:ABRT_Test_Cases and report your findings in the tables below.

• QA:Testcase_ABRT - default crash report
• QA:Testcase_ABRT_Logger - Logger plugin
• QA:Testcase_ABRT_Mailx - Mailx plugin
• QA:TestCase ABRT BlackList - package blacklist
• QA:Testcase ABRT GPG check --reporting crashes of signed packages only
• QA:TestCase ABRT GPG Keys -- additional keys for signing packages
• QA:Testcase ABRT Actions and Reporters -- testing of action/reporting plugins
• QA:Testcase ABRT Cron -- periodical plugins using cron
• QA:Testcase ABRT Plugins -- configuring plugins

Known issues

Consult list of active tickets before reporting an issue. The most common issues are listed below:

• Applet (or other icons) in notification area is not visible - that's a known bug in Rawhide, please try to run killall notification-area-applet and reload it a few times, it may help
• Recreate report for same crash - if you want to recreate a report of same crash, you have to remove ABRT's db and cache (rm -r /var/cache/abrt/*) and make a crash gain
• Nothing happened? - if it seems to do nothing, try to disable PGP checking and restart daemon
• Graphical warnings - gui writes some gtk warnings
• rpm %requires - it needs rpm >= 4.7.0-1
• bug-buddy or other crash catching tools might take precedence over ABRT if you are using them. ABRT will catch only crashes which are not catched by other tools.
• Cannot catch OpenOffice, KDE and Java - these applications have a built-in method for capturing failures
• if you're updating from version <= 0.0.5-6 - make sure you remove /var/abrt/cache/abrt-db (we've changed the db fomrat and not yet implemented automatic updating mechanism)
• GUI doesn't inform you about success of failure of a reporting. - But you can find results in ABRT's db (default path /var/cache/abrt, it is sqlite3 db, table name is "abrt")

Test Results

Issues that were identified

TestCase	Tester	Description	Bug references
QA:Testcase_ABRT	User:FasUser	Brief description of the problem	RHBZ #123456

Things that work alright

TestCase	Tester	Description
QA:Testcase_ABRT	User:FasUser	Brief description of what was done