[Ohrrpgce] Crash reporting

[James Paige]

Awesome! I'll take a look and see if I need to change anything on the build
VMs or on the dreamhost account when I get a chance. This has been a very
busy week, but I have been reading all your commit messages with a smile on
my face :D

---
James

On Wednesday, September 5, 2018, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
wrote:

> OK, I'm finally done with changes to the distrib scripts. I don't know how
> I managed to spend so many commits on cleaning them up...
> James, set the value of $SCPSYMBOLS, the location to upload the symbols
> archives to, to your liking. It's set in three different files.
> Although I renamed some scripts, that shouldn't affect anything.
>
> Hmm, I should make the windows nightly build script skip the build if
> there have been no svn commits, like the mac nightlies already do.
> (I'm not sure but I don't think we can easily reuse a .pdb file for two
> builds made from identical source code, because the .exe hash won't
> necessarily match)
> Skipping unnecessarily rebuilds would allow rebuilding the builds more
> than once per 24 hours (manually, or by cron).
> (I tried to let you still manually force additional early builds as long
> as there's been an svn commit, by putting the commit number in the archive
> name. But I just realised that won't work if you do a  manual build and
> then the scheduled build happens after, without any commits between. )
>
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 15:48, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> OK, great!
>> I think it would definitely be a good idea to get the php script to
>> forward reports to ohrrpgce-crash at hamsterrepublic.com so they don't get
>> forgotten (assuming there isn't a flood of them). Unless they are too
>> large, I guess - someone could try to include a large .rpg file in the
>> report. Is your email hosted by dreamhost? Then it seems that I can just
>> send email from another hamsterrepublic.com address to ohrrpgce-crash
>> using php's mail() function, according to the dreamhost docs.
>> And, I'll put the script in the web/ directory in svn.
>>
>> What about uploading the exe/pdb archives, where should they be put? I
>> guess I'll name them something like ohrrpgce-symbols-win-$RELEASE-$BACKENDS-$DATE-$SVNREV.7z
>> (I'll put 7z.exe in support/) and they can all go in one directory, and old
>> files can be deleted manually when we do a release, or automated later.
>> Incidentally, I notice that only mac nghtly builds skip building if there
>> are no changes to svn, linux and win builds build regardless.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 03:07, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Okay, you can now configure crashrpt to submit its reports to
>>> https://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/crashrpt/
>>>
>>> They get saved in /home/james_paige/crash_reports/ which is not web
>>> accessible.
>>>
>>> TMC, if you send me an ssh public key, I can give you ssh/sftp access to
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Feel free to make whatever changes you like to the nightly build
>>> scripts, and let me know what I need to change, either on the VMs or on the
>>> dreamhost account
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 8:34 AM, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Anything that gives better crash reports sounds great to me.
>>>>
>>>> Increasing the download size a bit is not a big problem. I think our
>>>> downloads are already comparatively tiny.
>>>>
>>>> I also don't expect any problem with storing a few gigabytes of exes
>>>> and crash related data. My dreamhost account might be stingy about
>>>> processor resources, but it is very generous about storage space.
>>>>
>>>> I'll see what I can do about setting up that php script. We can use it
>>>> over either http or https since I have LetsEncrypt certs for all my domains
>>>>
>>>> This is going to be a busy week, so if I don't get to it today it will
>>>> have to be next weekend. (I am making myself a reminder)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Sunday, September 2, 2018, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I've heard of quite a few reports of various kinds of crashes which I
>>>>> don't have enough information to do anything about, so am forced to ignore.
>>>>> (Mostly they've been reported on the SS Discord server which even has a
>>>>> dedicated channel for reporting bugs!).
>>>>>
>>>>> My previous attempt to generate stack traces on Windows required
>>>>> somewhat large extra dlls to parse the DWARF debug info in game/custom.exe,
>>>>> and they can't provide line numbers, which would require huge
>>>>> totally-unstripped builds. Line numbers would help hugely.
>>>>> So the new plan is to instead generate minidumps which get sent back
>>>>> for analysis. Win XP and later have a function to generate minidumps (and
>>>>> the dll can be downloaded for older Windows versions if needed) The
>>>>> minidump includes the stack of each thread, so you can use it to generate
>>>>> traces with line numbers and inspect variables. Optionally you can include
>>>>> more parts of the process memory like global variables, but that makes it
>>>>> large.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've been trying out an open-source reporter, which sends reports over
>>>>> the internet with minimal user will needed:
>>>>> http://crashrpt.sourceforge.net/
>>>>> There are a couple other such reporters, like BreakPad (originally
>>>>> from Mozilla, and used by Firefox and Chrome) but they seem pretty
>>>>> heavy-weight and more difficult to use.
>>>>>
>>>>> CrashRpt requires a separate .dll (I doubt I would be able to
>>>>> statically link) plus CrashSender.exe which does the actual work, and an
>>>>> ini file.
>>>>> Zipped, these are 300KB in total (I compiled a custom build to strip
>>>>> out the extravagant ability to record ogg theora videos and jpgs!). So
>>>>> that's fine for including with Custom in support/. But we wouldn't want
>>>>> these extra files when distributing games. However, if you have a full
>>>>> distribution of the OHRRPGCE, then any copy of game.exe can reuse the
>>>>> CrashRpt files from support/. If CrashRpt isn't available, game.exe can
>>>>> still easily save a minidump itself and ask the user to email it manually.
>>>>>
>>>>> == How this will work ==
>>>>>
>>>>> CrashRpt does not generate stack traces. It only collects data and
>>>>> sends it off. You can tell it which files to attach, and it includes some
>>>>> metadata and a minidump and can include a screenshot.
>>>>>
>>>>> fbc -gen gas generates STABS debug symbols, gcc generates DWARF
>>>>> symbols, and Visual C++ generates PDB symbols, which live in a separate
>>>>> .pdb file. PDB is undocumented, but recently LLVM folks have been creating
>>>>> documentation by examining code Microsoft open-sourced. So GCC and GDB
>>>>> don't support PDB or minidumps.
>>>>>
>>>>> We can use the cv2pdb tool to convert DWARF to .pdb files, which we
>>>>> keep. The executables themselves get stripped, and also need to be kept; a
>>>>> .pdb alone is useless. (Currently we partially strip exes, leaving in
>>>>> function symbols so gcc can create a backtrace. I don't think that's worth
>>>>> keeping anymore, except in the debug build. By fully stripping, we can
>>>>> reduce each exe by another 300KB.) cv2pdb doesn't convert FB strings
>>>>> correctly, but those are on the heap so not in the minidump anyway.
>>>>>
>>>>> To examine the minidumps, you can use Visual Studio (the free versions
>>>>> will do) or windbg (CLI), or use a commandline tool or server-side to
>>>>> generate a stracktrace and other info from it. CrashRpt has such a tool,
>>>>> and scripts for handling large numbers of crash reports and sorting them.
>>>>> BreakPad also has tools for it.
>>>>>
>>>>> == What we need to do ==
>>>>>
>>>>> Firstly the .pdb files should get uploaded somewhere. We will want to
>>>>> keep the .pdb files and .exes for every nightly build - not just the weekly
>>>>> archived nightlies! .pdb files alone are unfortunately useless.
>>>>> I'm going to get rid of most of most of our windows nightly builds,
>>>>> they're redundant now that you can switch graphics backend. So leaving just
>>>>> music_sdl, music_native, music_native2 and music_sdl-debug. (In fact,
>>>>> music_native and music_native2 appear broken and I couldn't find anyone who
>>>>> uses them or even remembers using them.)
>>>>> We should keep the files for at least every default (music_sdl) build
>>>>> since at least the last stable release, probably longer since not everyone
>>>>> upgrades promptly. Using xz, the game+custom exe+pdb files compress to
>>>>> 2.4MB. So 4 builds, 3 months of backups is ~1000MB. **
>>>>> An idea to save space: upload just the music_sdl files since the last
>>>>> stable release, (~250MB) and keep all the other files on the build machine
>>>>> in the unlikely event they're needed.
>>>>>
>>>>> (** however I just remembered that exes from the nightly build machine
>>>>> are significantly larger than ones built on my machine)
>>>>>
>>>>> Secondly we need to collect reports - CrashRpt can send via HTTP,
>>>>> HTTPS, SMTP and by opening an email client. I assume dreamhost will block
>>>>> emails from random IPs, so we will want HTTP.
>>>>> There is an example php script to accept reports and save them.
>>>>> http://crashrpt.sourceforge.net/docs/html/sending_error_
>>>>> reports.html#httpsend
>>>>> I guess it would be easiest if we modify this script to email us the
>>>>> zip file. And keep a copy on the server in case something goes wrong? Can
>>>>> we put us up at hamsterrepublic.com?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ohrrpgce mailing list
>>> ohrrpgce at lists.motherhamster.org
>>> http://lists.motherhamster.org/listinfo.cgi/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.motherhamster.org/pipermail/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org/attachments/20180905/872bb8b3/attachment-0001.html>