533611 - Socorro - TCBS - missing totals by OS on blank signatures

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Socorro :: General, task)

Description

[K Lars Lohn [:lars] [:klohn]]

In the case in TCBS where the signature is "unavailable" there is no breakdown by operating system for totals.  why?

Comment 1

[Austin King [:ozten]]

(In reply to comment #0)
lars - I think you'll also have a change here.

Checked into trunk, now sending '(signature unavailable)' for the case where the signature is empty string or NULL. This value will be url encoded of course.

Example (without url encoding for clarity)
/200911/topcrash/sig/trend/history/p/Firefox/v/3.5.3/sig/(signature unavailable)/end/2009-11-19T12:00:00T+0000/duration/180/steps/60

Comment 2

[K Lars Lohn [:lars] [:klohn]]

the two cases of /200911/topcrash/sig/trend/rank/... (hereafter referred to as TopCrashBySignatureTrends) returning NULL or empty string need to be handled differently, because they represent two different causes.  

NULL means minidump_stackwalk crashed or was otherwise unable to process the dump.  No signature could be created.

'' means that breakpad on the client did not record which thread caused the crash.  No signature could be created.

Should the TopCrashBySignatureTrends service return other values for signature in these cases?  Ozten suggested that the additional information should be "out of band".  This suggests that I make no changes here and let the UI display what it wants for signature in these cases.

I think we're going to end up having to internally use a value other than what is displayed and human readable.  

The /200911/topcrash/sig/trend/history/... (hereafter referred to as SignatureHistory) service needs to be able to accept queries in these two cases, too.  .../sig//...  may work for the empty signature case, but specifiying the NULL case is less clear.  We need to come up with some literals for these cases that do not collide with possible real crash signatures.  That eliminates the words "null", "NULL", "empty", or "blank" or variants with angle brackets, square brackets, braces or parenthesis. I think we'd be safe with ##NULL##, ##empty##, or some other doubled quoting.  A longer unquoted sentence would also be feasible.

What do you think?