Re: The Future of Bug Buddy

[jacob helixcode com (Jacob "Ulysses" Berkman)]

Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com> writes:

> I do most of my work on Solaris (that may come as no
> great surprise!) where there is a tool pldd to
> list the shared objects loaded by a process.
> There is at least one effort to create a similar
> tool for Linux (see 
> http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/pipermail/plug/2000-May/002417.html)
> 
> If Bug Buddy ran pldd (or similar) on a process before it
> terminates, it then knows at least the runtime code dependencies
> of the application and could find the version number of each
> shared object accordingly. This can be done without the need
> for a package description or a specialised file for Bug Buddy's
> use.

Yes.  I have thought about using just ldd on the binary, and looking
at which package owns the library files.  Doing this pldd hack gives a
bit more information.  I'll probably use it.

> This leaves out things like versions of configuration files,
> data files, etc. that may cause an application to crash,
> but it's difficult in any case to get version numbers for
> the various files an app may use so this may not be
> such a great loss.
> 
> Would this meet the information requirements of Bug Buddy
> without the need for additional meta-data files?

The problems remains of accurately mapping applications to modules and
modules / packages to bug tracking systems, which I am not sure can be
done without external data files.

Jacob
-- 
"I've got nothing to say but that's ok." -- John Lennon