FYI: We've forked the Breakpad client code

[Ted Mielczarek]

FYI, I landed a patch[1] yesterday that forked the Breakpad client code.
Everything that was in toolkit/crashreporter/google-breakpad/src/client
is now in toolkit/crashreporter/breakpad-client. Google has switched
Chromium to using Crashpad (their new crash reporting library) on
Windows, OS X and Android, so that code is effectively unmaintained in
Breakpad. The Linux client gets some fixes but they are mostly ChromeOS
related, so I don't expect us to be missing much. We've had a number of
changes recently that either needed invasive changes or API weirdness to
upstream, and since nobody else is maintaining that code we might as
well just have our own copy to change as we see fit. This means that you
can now land changes to the client-side exception handling and minidump
writing code with just the normal Mozilla review process, without
upstreaming anything to Breakpad.

We'll still be using the tools (for dump_syms) and processor (for
client-side stackwalking) parts of Breakpad from upstream, since those
are actively maintained (for the time being).

There is a bug open on looking into moving us to use Crashpad. I don't
know what the benefits would be, aside from using code that's actually
maintained, but it's likely to be a significant amount of work. If I had
to choose I'd be more likely to spend the effort writing a replacement
in Rust instead.

-Ted

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1336548

[Aaron Klotz]

This is great news, Ted!

Are you going to be creating a module for this? Who are the peers?

-Aaron

[Ted Mielczarek]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017, at 02:47 PM, Aaron Klotz wrote:
> This is great news, Ted!
>
> Are you going to be creating a module for this? Who are the peers?

I don't think a new module is necessary, we've covered the existing
integration code (nsExceptionHandler.cpp etc) under the Toolkit module
for a long time and I think it's been OK. If it becomes a problem we can
certainly reevaluate. There aren't a lot of people that are comfortable
reviewing this code, but that's not exactly a unique situation in Gecko.

-Ted

[Jim Blandy]

Under the circumstances, I'll volunteer to review, if that's feasible.

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[Mike Hommey]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2017 at 12:41:07PM -0800, Jim Blandy wrote:
> Under the circumstances, I'll volunteer to review, if that's feasible.

I can too.

[Nick Fitzgerald]

I can review the DWARF related bits in a pinch, too.