437562 - consider using the curl command instead of libcurl for crash reports from 32-bit builds on 64-bit systems

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

Currently crashreporter on Linux relies on the libcurl.so library being available on the system.

This library is usually available on 32-bit systems but is often not available on 64-bit systems and is not otherwise required in Mozilla.

Using instead the curl command line interface (and resolving bug 434997) would enable crash reports on 64-bit systems.

The syntax is

setenv("http_proxy", "[user:password@]machine[:port]", overwrite);

curl -s -S --form-string name1=value1 --form-string name2=value2 ... \
  --form upload_file_minidump=@70945687-06aa-fe1a-51eae74d-364010cd.dmp \
  https://crash-reports.mozilla.com/submit

response_body is on stdout and error_description on stderr.

Comment 1

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I'm not terribly excited about this. It creates a more difficult interface, and I'm also not terribly confident that our utf-8 strings (like in comments) wouldn't get mangled along the way.

Comment 2

[Karl Tomlinson (:karlt)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> It creates a more difficult interface,

Yes, you are right.  pipe,fork,dup2,execvp,select,read is much more clumsy.

> and I'm also not terribly confident that our utf-8 strings (like in comments)
> wouldn't get mangled along the way.

I'm not aware of a reason why they might get mangled.  The strings passed to curl through execvp would an unaltered NULL-terminated list of bytes.  I wouldn't have expected curl to treat "--form-string" command line arguments differently than curl_formadd treats its CURLFORM_COPYNAME and CURLFORM_COPYCONTENTS arguments, unless there is an "=" in the field name.

"--form-string <name=string>
        (HTTP) Similar to --form except that the value  string  for  the
        named  parameter  is used literally."

But, whether the extra complexity is worthwhile depends on the number of 64-bit Linux users running mozilla.com 32-bit builds without a libcurl in the distribution's 32-bit compat libs.

Comment 3

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

I don't think I'd take a patch for this even if someone wanted to fix it, it's just too clumsy.