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[recommenders-dev] [error] Introduction to our new error reporting tool - test phase

Hi recommenders-dev,

we recently experienced some very troubling issues with m2e and other plugins which are now fixed (hopefully). However, the sad thing was that for a long time no one reported these issues, and thus, *we* didn’t notice them earlier and couldn’t fix them. This is sad and we though about what we could do to improve the error reporting and get notified about those errors earlier.

As you may have noticed, we have a GSOC this year that works on a common logging infrastructure for Eclipse (by Ashwin). In this GSOC, Ashwin also developed a Logback-to-Bugzilla Appender that logs errors directly to the Eclipse Bugzilla. Inspired by this appender, I created a simplified version of that appender that (if the user permits) logs errors directly to a web server at eclipse.org and notfies us whenever new stacktraces arrive.

The UI and workflow is pretty simple yet:
Whenever an error is logged to the Eclipse error log, our service checks whether it’s an error logged by an Eclipse plugin (by checking the plugin id starts with „org.eclipse“). If so it opens a dialog asking the user for permission to send that error to our server for further processing. On the server side, the error is logged and we are notified by email that there is something new to analyze. For a brief summary of the UI, please see the screenshots below.

I’ve put the code on the HEAD update site for further testing and I’d like to ask you to install the "Stacktraces RCP“ feature into your IDE and report any trouble with it you may experience. Please note that there are also some links at the bottom of the WizardPage that allow you to share your thoughts about this feature and provide some feedback and new ideas. Please make use of them as much as you can :-)


A few more words on the plan:
If the tool passes the testing phase, I’ll seek PMC/EMO permission to put this on the Milestones update site and make it accessible to an larger audience. If we get this, we may also start thinking about integrating this into the Eclipse Mars Milestones. But this is just a vision yet and depends on your feedback

So, happy error reporting and I’m looking for your feedback!

Marcel







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