674793 - Get the beta number into crash reports

Status: REOPENED

(Toolkit :: Crash Reporting, defect)

Description

[Laura Thomson :laura]

Socorro's life would be a lot easier if we could get the beta number passed through with the crash dump.  At the moment we are being forced to build Yet Another FTP Scraper (bug 674605).

I assume this bug will necessitate another bug to get the beta number into the build in the first place: perhaps someone (Ted?) can advise which component I should file that against.

Comment 1

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

since all betas are now potential release candidates, you're going to have a tough time getting this change made.  To get that number into the crash dump, I would think it would have to be baked into the binary.  That would mean having to make a change to the release candidate before release - we wouldn't want that beta number in the release. That's exactly what this new release system is trying to avoid.

Comment 2

[(not currently active) Ted Mielczarek]

Yeah, as far as the build system is concerned, the thing being built is a final release. There's no trace of a beta number anywhere. Plus, as Lars says, the final beta build becomes the release with no changes, AFAIK.

Comment 3

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

Yeah, the only place "beta" is present is in the filenames - not in the application itself. As I understand it, this is because LegNeato wants the Betas to look as much like final releases as possible.

Would it help if we sent you some notification (e-mail, posting to some api, or whatever suits you, really) with the information you require?

Comment 4

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Yeah, the only place "beta" is present is in the filenames - not in the
> application itself. As I understand it, this is because LegNeato wants the
> Betas to look as much like final releases as possible.
> 
> Would it help if we sent you some notification (e-mail, posting to some api,
> or whatever suits you, really) with the information you require?

We have resorted to scraping the info off of FTP for the upcoming release (bug 674605), this actually works ok for everything except mobile right now, but it seems like a fragile thing to depend on in general.

We could go forward with the FTP scraper until such time as a more stable mechanism is available. 

If having the beta version in the product is undesirable then I guess we should WONTFIX this one and make sure we're tracking some better future way of doing this in a separate bug (I know of several, we should make a decision on what direction to go here).

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> If having the beta version in the product is undesirable

We'll have to get Christian and/or other drivers to make this call. From a RelEng standpoint, this wouldn't be a big deal.

Comment 6

[LegNeato]

We don't want "beta" in the product...in the best case scenario the last beta is what we release (I know we're not there yet). Seeing how FTP is sort of the reference here until Metrics or Release Management gets a system up I think we are ok for now.

We really need to get together and hash out the whole model tree and terminology for the various bits we interact with thogh.

Comment 7

[Robert Helmer [:rhelmer]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Would it help if we sent you some notification (e-mail, posting to some api,
> or whatever suits you, really) with the information you require?

This would help in the meantime, e-mail at the very least. Do you need a bug for this?

(In reply to comment #6)
> We really need to get together and hash out the whole model tree and
> terminology for the various bits we interact with thogh.

+1

Comment 8

[[e-mail] (:bhearsum)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > Would it help if we sent you some notification (e-mail, posting to some api,
> > or whatever suits you, really) with the information you require?
> 
> This would help in the meantime, e-mail at the very least. Do you need a bug
> for this?

Yeah, if you could file a RelEng bug with the protocol/format and other details that'd be great.

Comment 9

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

The beta number is now included and visible on Socorro, closing.

Comment 10

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

The beta number isn't included in the annotations in the crash report. Socorro still does this crazy thing where it scrapes archive.mozilla.org for the necessary information to do lookups to figure out which beta (and rc) the build is. That's why periodically there are crash reports for nnn.nb0--the b0 indicates Socorro couldn't figure out the beta number.

I'm switching this to WONTFIX given that it's been 13+ years and we're still doing the same thing.

Comment 11

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

Ugh, you're right I forgot that it's still done that way. Reopening, sorry for the noise. We still have valid bugs older than this. If it's valid it's valid.