Something for the developers

[Ace (SWE)]

I was working a bit on some of my own projects when a thought struck me;

Why don't we integrate something like Google Breakpad into OpenMW?
(I'm not good at writing long posts)

[Zini]

Never heard of breakpad before. But from what I see, it can only handle exceptions. That would be pretty useless, since OpenMW is designed to continue running, even when exceptions occur (unless that happens during initialisation).

[Sadler]

In my old application it was created very simply: checkbox in installer "anonymously gather the information..." and after every crash it automatically sends the crashdump (invisible for user).

[Ace (SWE)]

Never heard of breakpad before. But from what I see, it can only handle exceptions. That would be pretty useless, since OpenMW is designed to continue running, even when exceptions occur (unless that happens during initialisation).

Either I don't completely understand the "only handle exception" part, or I don't have the same definition of an exception.
I consider exceptions as the things you throw, and this snippet from the breakpad test crash_generation_app begs to differ:

Code: Select all

void DerefZeroCrash() {
  int* x = 0;
  *x = 1;
}

void InvalidParamCrash() {
  printf(NULL);
}

void PureCallCrash() {
  Derived derived;
}

[Zini]

Okay, that makes more sense. The documentation could be worded a bit clearer. In C++ context the word "Exception" usually means C++ exception.

Anyway, still not excited about it. We don't exactly have a lot of stability problems. Looks like a non-trivial amount of work for little benefit (plus the additional dependency).

In my old application it was created very simply: checkbox in installer "anonymously gather the information..." and after every crash it automatically sends the crashdump (invisible for user).

That is very bad IMHO. Software should never "phone home" without asking the user for permission.

[Sadler]

Software should never "phone home" without asking the user for permission.

Google Chrome, for example, does the same.

[Zini]

Yes, there is a lot of misbehaving software out there..

[Greendogo]

"Allow OpenMW to automatically report crash information." [ ] yes [ ] no