The university-based research project Cooperative Bug Isolation (CBI) digs into Fedora packages to isolate and report bugs. Fedora 10 is now included.
To participate in a distributed statistical debugging of a Fedora release, all you need is to install a specially configured package from the Cooperative Bug Isolation (CBI) project. Installing (per yum, for example) what is called the CBI instrumentation code along with the Fedora release creates a separate, independent CBI repository. The instrumentation packages are modified versions of Evolution 2.24.1, GNOME Panel and Nautilus, GIMP 2.6.2, Gnumeric 1.8.2, Pidgin 2.5.2, Rhythmbox 0.11.6 and SPIM 7.3.
The CBI project assures users that the self-debugging has little or no impact on running Fedora itself, and "very sparse" random sampling is involved. More information on CBI's measurement and reporting methods, privacy protection, and the project as a whole can be found here. Guidelines for Fedora developers who want to adopt CBI for source debugging are also included.
CBI project leader Ben Liblit of the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced the Fedora 10 support on the Fedora mailing list. Support for earlier Fedora versions is also available, albeit with modifications to configurations for Cores 1 through 3. The researchers assert that reports for the older distributions provide equally valuable analyses. The CBI project seemed to run out of time to support further distros and packages, although suggestions are welcome.
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