1288309 - Improve documentation about individual crash reports

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: Webapp, task)

Description

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

We have poor documentation about crash reports. It's incomplete and spread across various places. I want to consolidate and improve it.

This bug is about documentation to help understand individual crash reports.

Comment 1

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

I've finished a first pass at this stuff. I've done the following things.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Understanding_crash_reports
- I created this page, which is all about reading a single crash report. This
  is the main part of the work. It has lots of new material, as well as some
  stuff copied from or inspired by existing docs, including these:
  * Benoit's response in https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/3lGzpLGHt6I
  * https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/helping-crashes
  * https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/contributors-crash-course
  * https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/07/13/crash-investigation-in-firefox-nightly/
- There are plenty of "XXX" comments about stuff I was unsure about. I will
  email dev-platform and projectuptime-team to ask for help.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging
- I added a link to the new page in the "Advanced debugging techniques" section.
- I added a link to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging
  from the same section.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Crash_Data_Analysis
- I moved the stuff about minidumps into
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging/Debugging_a_minidump.
- I removed the field descriptions because they're now in tool-tips in
  crash-stats.
- I moved what little was left into
  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Crash_reporting,
  and made this page a redirect to that page.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Uptime/NightlyCrashAnalysis
- I moved a couple of things from this page to the new page.

Comment 2

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

I solicited feedback from dev-platform and the Uptime email list and made a bunch of changes to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Understanding_crash_reports.

It's not perfect but it's good enough that I don't plan to do anything more on it for now.

Comment 3

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

What about a link to that URL from the report index page?

Comment 4

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

(In reply to Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe] from comment #3)
> What about a link to that URL from the report index page?

Excellent idea. I'll write a patch.

Comment 5

[Nicholas Nethercote [inactive]]

> Excellent idea. I'll write a patch.

In the end I filed bug 1290329 because I thought I'd leave this non-trivial presentation issue to a crash-stats expert :)