A crash reporter

[John Bailey]

Casey Ho wrote:
<snip>
> How do people feel about adding an automated crash reporter/processing
> program to Pidgin?  I think there's huge value in being able to
> immediately inform the user what plugin/protocol crashed without
> having to either install debug tools or wait to reproduce it.

I agree here.  This would be particularly helpful in showing users that they
should complain to (for example) MusicTracker or the Plugin Pack when a plugin
crashes.  Could we have this crash tool grab an offending plugin's website
address from the plugin info struct to tell the user what site to go to?  And if
we can, is there an easy way we could have our own plugins point to
developer.pidgin.im instead of pidgin.im (we use PIDGIN_WEBSITE everywhere,
which is pidgin.im)?

> The main caveat is that Breakpad is a C++ program that depends on
> libstdc++.  I wrangled with automake and autoconf to make sure Pidgin
> will work as normal if C++/stdc++ aren't available (effectively making
> stdc++ an optional dependency).  But even then, how do you developers
> feel about including some amount of C++ code?

I'm not particularly crazy about C++, but as long as this is all optional, I
don't have any objections.  Of course, I'm only one person :)

> You can see the diff at http://caseyho.com/misc/pidgin/
> 
> To keep the size down, the Breakpad code is omitted.  If you want to
> compile this, just download the Breakpad code and paste it in.

Do we need to actually include the Breakpad code in-tree?  I'd prefer avoiding
an in-tree library that's maintained elsewhere if possible.  I don't think this
is necessarily a deal-breaker, though, as long as someone is willing to make
sure we're up to date.

> Limitations: This is only set up for Linux so far.  No Windows,
> although the code exists.

So this can be expanded to Windows eventually if we think it's worth the effort?
 If this is the main reason for including Breakpad in-tree, remember that the
Win32 build environment can have additional dependencies added to the win32-dev
tree if necessary.

John

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