Comment 6 for bug 1539719

Hello,

I will disable patches to dbginfo.sh. However, note that in a way I dislike dbginfo.sh.

First of all the name of the script is an awkward one, very generic and violates Debian Policy (which ubuntu also follows), specifically that the binary ends with an extension.

Secondly, using custom, per-architecture scripts does not follow current best practices of sustaining & support engineering. The currently upcoming framework for such purposes is sosreport http://sos.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ and it is used by Canonical engineers and engineers of other supported distributions on z Series. Integrating into sosreport with sosreport specific plugins would be great.

On Ubuntu, we also have a combination of apport & whoopsie. The former collects a lot of debug infomration about running system, and specific packages via hooks if a report got initiated manually or due to a crash. Apport comes with a privacy policy, and uploads things privately over encrypted connections into launchpad for further follow-up. Also apport crash files can be off-loaded from a system and reported using another system (e.g. scp .crash from mainframe onto laptop, report from a laptop). Secondly there are automatic crash reports, which one can opt-into on server, to upload annomyzed crash data into https://errors.ubuntu.com/ ( aka whoopsie-daisy) crash data from that website is used to monitor, track, identify and prioritise bugs and crashes. One in particular useful feature is that canaries software updates use that data, for example if unforseen packages/daemons start to crash due to an SRU and/or Security Update, such updates may be pulled or further-fixed to prevent regressions in a stable release.

I hope we can integrate hardware specific debugging functionality into the existing debug and support frameworks, rather than requiring custom, mainframe specific, actions from canonical support and ubuntu users. On ubuntu, we request our users to simply do $ ubuntu-bug foo -> to collect all relevant information, and securely communicate it about any problem faced, be that installer, a particular package name and/or binary name.

Regards,

Dimitri.