Sometimes I’ve received suggestions to reject bugreports without a good stack trace. Unfortunately, I never knew how to change ‘bad stacktrace’ into code. I was always thinking about what functions a stack trace should have not to be considered useless.
Today a user filing the same crasher over and over again gave me a good idea. Although I want to prevent a user filing the same bug over and over again, it wasn’t possible for this crasher as it did not have any detectable functions in it. However, ‘no functions’ automatically means it is a bad stack trace. So these bugreports can easily be rejected just by checking if the bug-buddy report contained a stack trace without any function (only ??).
As of now, bugreports without any detectable functions will be rejected automatically. Checking with the bugs filed in December 2006, this would have rejected 1139 bugs out of the 10190 bugs filed. Meaning: far more than I imagined!
I have more ideas on how to reduce the bug-buddy spam, but to make it easier to code I want to upgrade GNOME Bugzilla to 3.0 first. That is going to take a while.
Note: When these bugreport are rejected the user will get a mail explaining why it was rejected (and a pointer to the GettingTraces page. Plus at the end of that mail a full copy of the bugreport.