Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora Core 6 [LWN.net]

From:		Ben Liblit <liblit-AT-cs.wisc.edu>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora Core 6
Date:		Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:54:55 -0500

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project (CBI) is now available for Fedora 
Core 6.  CBI (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/) is an ongoing research effort 
to find and fix bugs in the real world.  We distribute specially 
modified versions of popular open source software packages.  These 
special versions monitor their own behavior while they run, and report 
back how they work (or how they fail to work) in the hands of real users 
like you.  Even if youve never written a line of code in your life, you 
can help make things better for everyone simply by using our special 
bug-hunting packages.

We currently offer instrumented versions of Evolution, Gaim, The GIMP, 
GNOME Panel, Gnumeric, Nautilus, Rhythmbox, and SPIM.  Download at 
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/>.  We support yum, apt, and many 
other RPM updater tools; see 
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/repo-config.html> for customized 
configuration help for any of our supported distributions and updater 
tools.  Or just download and install 
<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/cbi/downloads/rpm/fedora-6-i386/RP...>
to automatically configure most popular RPM updaters to use the CBI FC6 
repository.

It's that easy!  Tell your friends!  Tell your neighbors!  The more of 
you there are, the more bugs we can find.

We still offer CBI packages for Fedora Core 1/2/4/5 too.  When and if 
you decide to upgrade to FC6, we'll be ready for you.  Until then, your 
participation remains valuable!

-- Dr. Ben, the CBI guy

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Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora Core 6

Posted Oct 26, 2006 16:30 UTC (Thu) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

Neat. I like all the effort in the free software community to fix bugs and improve quality control. I *really* like projects like this that can gather useful information from participating users who aren't developers. I think the only drawback will be the privacy concerns. I know they address them on the site but that won't always make people feel okay to use the software. I think I might try this out.

Cooperative Bug Isolation for Fedora Core 6

Posted Oct 29, 2006 3:49 UTC (Sun) by liblit (guest, #41373) [Link]

Thanks for your interest in the project, TwoTimeGrime.

CBI only works if enough users believe they can trust it. Discussing privacy & security frankly on the web site is part of earning that trust. Open-sourcing the code itself is another part. If you have other ideas for how CBI can deal with these important issues, I am very happy to hear them. After all, the more users feel OK about participating, the better CBI can work.

Regards,
Dr. Ben