313050 - No talkbacks anymore in hourly zip builds

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webtools Graveyard :: Tinderbox, defect)

Description

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051019 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051019 Firefox/1.5

I miss the talkbacks in hourly zip builds. 

In branch it was included in 1.8b5_2005101107 but not anymore in 1.8b5_2005101110.
In trunk I saw the last talkback in 1.9a1_2005101104 but it was gone in
1.9a1_2005101121.

Forgive me my ignorance if this is a policy. :)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

It's not installed everywhere : only a small percentage of instalations get it
by default, to prevent overload of the talkback server. You can force
installation with the custom installation.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

So you can't use hourlies anymore for testing crashes unless you install them?
Only the installer hourly builds are usable for testing?

Comment 3

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Reopened because of possible misunderstanding.

Comment 4

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

It is a bit labour-intensive to copy & paste a talkback from an old build into
the folder extensions of every build you want to try..

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

As far as I know, Talkback only works (produces stack traces with function
names, etc) with nightlies, so it doesn't make sense to expect the Talkback
client to be included with hourlies.

Comment 6

[Hermann Schwab]

(In reply to comment #4)
> It is a bit labour-intensive to copy & paste a talkback from an old build into
> the folder extensions of every build you want to try..

It doesn't work this way. Talkback can't be transferred from one build to
another, as the builds differ in symbol addresses. You'll get a talkback record,
but it talks nonsense. Also a Talkback Report is useful only as long as the
symbols are available at the talkback server. Crash with an older build, and you
get a talkback record with offsets instead of sysmbols, no links to LXR.   
I don't think talkback is useful for hourly builds. Who long is an hourly build
used? Until the next arrives. How long must the symbols be retained at the
server? Imho it makes sense to have talkback in the nightlies. They are longer
used, a day, or a week.

Comment 7

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

Due to resource limitations, we only package Talkback with nightlies.  And as
mentioned, copying over Talkback files to other builds is not a good idea.

We are working on expanding our symbols space to keep symbols around for longer
periods of time, but for now, we only have the capacity to hold about 10 days
worth of symbols for nightlies...so please use those builds for crash testing. 
We hope to grow the days to 30, but even then we plan to only include Talkback
with nightlies.

Marking WONTFIX.  Sorry...

Comment 8

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

If they didn't work it is no loss. :)

Comment 9

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Well, miracles still happen; they are back! :D

Comment 10

[Jay Patel [:jay]]

Ria:  Keep in mind that any crashes you send in will be useless since we do not store symbols for the hourly builds on the Talkback processing server. :-(  If you are able to reproduce a crash, it will be nice if you could try with a nightly so we get some good data.  Thanks for the update.

Comment 11

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

OK. Any thoughts why they are included again (as this will generate a lot of useless information)?