Subject: Re: port-xen/29887: sysctl kern.consdev coredumps
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@netbsd.org>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@shagadelic.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 06/20/2005 19:17:08
On Jun 20, 2005, at 4:32 PM, Bill Studenmund wrote:

> My day job is working on a shipping product. Core dumps are bad. Core
> dumps generate customer service issues, and impact the reliaility  
> of the
> product. I would much rather have customers reporting logs like  
> "Error X
> with client (null)" than passing back stack traces.

My day job is also working on a shipping commercial product (though  
not NetBSD-based), and I must say that giving the end user the  
ability to submit a problem report with an actual core file is  
invaluable.

If your product is buggy, then fix the bugs -- don't paper over it in  
an effort to "improve reliability" ... you're just substituting  
incorrect behavior (maybe benign in the case of a log message, but  
maybe not in some other case).  If stack traces are too difficult to  
work with, then improve the debugging infrastructure in your product.

-- thorpej