Socorro and Firefox 57

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro--specifically the Socorro collector.

Teams at Mozilla are feverishly working on Firefox 57. That's super important work and we're getting down to the wire. Socorro is a critical part of that development work as it collects incoming crashes, processes them, and has tools for analysis.

This blog post covers some of the things Socorro engineering has been doing to facilitate that work and what we're planning from now until Firefox 57 release.

This quarter

This quarter, we replaced Snappy with Tecken for more reliable symbol lookup in Visual Studio and other clients.

We built a Docker-based local dev environment for Socorro making it easier to run Socorro on your local machine configured like crash-stats.mozilla.com. It now takes five steps to getting Socorro running on your computer.

We also overhauled the signature generation system in Socorro and slapped on a command-line interface. Now you can test the effects of signature generation changes on specific crashes as well as groups of crashes on your local machine.

We've also been fixing stability issues and bugs and myriad other things.

Now until Firefox 57

Starting today and continuing until after Firefox 57 release, we are:

  1. prioritizing your signature generation changes, getting them landed, and pushing them to -prod

  2. triaging Socorro bugs into "need it right now" and "everything else" buckets

  3. deferring big changes to Socorro until after Firefox 57 including API endpoint deprecation, major UI changes to the crash-stats interface, and other things that would affect your workflow

We want to make sure crash analysis is working as best as it can so you can do the best you can so we can have a successful Firefox 57.

Please contact us if you need something!

We hang out on #breakpad on irc.mozilla.org. You can also write up bugs.

Hopefully this helps. If not, let us know!

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.