1087654 - Add about:logcat

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, defect, P5)

Description

[James Willcox (:snorp) ([e-mail]) (he/him)]

We should add about:logcat, which shows Gecko's logcat output. On pre-JB devices, it would show the logcat for the whole device. This can be useful when debugging stuff, and on JB and higher it's not possible for other apps (like CatLog, aLogcat, etc) to show logcat output for other apps (like us).

For bonus points, you can alias it to about:lolcat as well.

Comment 1

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Bonus points for copying only Gecko stuff to maybe Mozilla Pastebin, generating a short link and making mention to include that in bug reports on Bugzilla in one's filings

Comment 2

[:Margaret Leibovic]

jchen wrote a sweet add-on for this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/logview/

Comment 3

[Nick Alexander :nalexander [he/him]]

This is an interesting ticket.

The source for jchen's add-on is at https://github.com/darchons/fennec-logview.  Inspecting, it looks like the add-on opens /dev/log/main as a C file and then reads from it in a loop.  I'm surprised this works, since Fennec doesn't request the READ_LOGS permission.  jchen will know more, I'm sure.

I'd prefer to do this at the Java level because it's likely more efficient and could possibly collect logs during background operations (when JavaScript is not running), and also provide diagnostics for Gecko-level problems.  It's likely we could do something similar to what fennec-logview is doing at the Java level -- polling the log file in a Java thread -- and write a rotating log file.

This is not trivial but it is quite well scoped.

Comment 4

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Re-triaging per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1473195

Needinfo :susheel if you think this bug should be re-triaged.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.