Bug Reporting

[kchall]

When bugs arise, add an option to actually send us a bug report with information on what went wrong (e-mail? webpage that hosts the reports?).

[bhallen]

I just did some poking around, and I wasn't able to find any off-the-shelf solutions to this problem. It does seem feasible to use email, though. I've pasted a basic script that does this below. The big hitch is that the script needs to include log-in credentials, so we'd need to figure out a way to hide those.

import smtplib

fromaddr = "arbitraryaddress@somewhere.com"
toaddrs = ["addressthatcollectsbugs@somewhere.com"]

msg = 'test message'

server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', port=587)
server.ehlo()
server.starttls()
server.ehlo()
server.login('yourgmailaccount@somewhere.com', 'yourpassword')
server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, msg)
server.quit()

[devyn]

It looks like if we want to be sure that bugs/exceptions are caught in worker threads, we'll need to have subclasses of FunctionWorker implement a method other than run() -- perhaps process()?

run() can then pseudo-be:

class FunctionWorker:
    def run(self):
        try:
            self.process()
        except:
            # report the exception

[bhallen]

@devyn It looks like the current solution is to have a bunch of checks like this in the Workers which use the emit method to (I assume) pass the Exception on to the main thread:

except PCTError as e:
    self.errorEncountered.emit(e)
    return
except Exception as e:
    e = PCTPythonError(e)
    self.errorEncountered.emit(e)
    return

Your solution looks like it might be more general, though. Is that right?

[bhallen]

re the original issue (getting PCT to report bugs to us):

I just pushed a commit that adds basic bug reporting. It sends traceback and system info as an email from/to the account pctbugs@gmail.com . Right now there are two major elements lacking in the implementation:

• We should include PCT version in the bug report. Does PCT know what version it is? I couldn't find a relevant variable anywhere.
• We should add a check-box or something like that to the PCTPythonError's message box. Could someone more familiar with Qt do this? I think it should default to checked and say something like "Auto-report this bug to the PCT development team when closing this window". We'd then want to call the smt_report method upon closing the window rather than at Exception time as happens now.

[mmcauliffe]

Versioning is in __init__.py of corpustools, so if you do:

import corpustools

print(corpustools.__version__)

That'll spit out '1.1.1' or whatever version we're up to now. It doesn't know master/dev/anything on Github, but that should be fine for most users.

[devyn]

@bhallen Ah, I didn't see that before. But it's definitely not ideal; I'd be willing to bet that there are a few where that error-handling code is either not present or doesn't encompass all of the code. For example, although you wouldn't expect an exception outside of the try block in corpustools.gui.migui.MIWorker, it might be possible. So it's probably better to come up with something that handles it automatically.