Are crash reports useful

[J. Landman Gay]

Eric Chatonet wrote:

> I let you report this thread to Mark W. ;-)

I asked Mark to respond, and he asked me to post to this list, as he 
isn't subscribed here. Basically, it is true that the format of the logs 
is generated by the OS and there is nothing to worry about regarding 
confidentiality. Here is what he said:

***
The crash logs are those generated by the 'MiniDump' component that is 
present in Windows. This is a system provided library that allows 
applications to produce a dump containing the state of the call stack 
when it crashes. It is the same component that is used by the default 
Microsoft handler for these which usually prompts you to ask if you 
'want to send information to Microsoft to diagnose'. As far as I'm aware 
this information is entirely unencrypted - its just encoded in a binary 
form.

The information present in the file is pretty much identical to the 
information you get when a CrashLog from CrashReporter on OS X. Although 
different settings (small, medium, large) can result in more information 
being included - which means they can be closer to UNIX-style 'Core 
dumps' than a simple log. As far as I'm aware, 'small' contains just a 
call stack, 'medium' contains the call-stack and contents of variables 
on the stack and 'large' contains any interesting segments of memory 
(although I've never been able to use 'large' dumps to any more effect 
than 'small' or 'medium').

Rather than a text file, the minidump file is binary file which has the 
advantage of being loadable directly into Visual Studio for post-mortem 
analysis. Using this (by combining with special debug symbol files we 
keep from compiling) we can typically jump directly to the line that 
caused Revolution to crash - as you can imagine this can make 
determining the cause of a crash much easier.

The sensitivity of any data included is minimal as it is the state of 
the Revolution *engine* that is encoded in these files - this means any 
state of your Revolution application is completely obfuscated... Unless 
of course you can divine the functioning of Rev script by the C++ calls 
that result in getting made in the engine itself.

-- 

Warmest Regards,

Mark.

***

So it sounds to me like if you want to examine the contents of the log, 
you could look at it in VB just as Mark does, provided you understand 
the binary notation.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com