Opened 4 weeks ago

Closed 9 days ago

#18819 closed enhancement (fixed)

Improve Mac crash dump formatting of stack trace

Reported by: Tom Goddard Owned by: Tom Goddard
Priority: moderate Milestone:
Component: Infrastructure Version:
Keywords: Cc: chimerax-programmers
Blocked By: Blocking:
Notify when closed: Platform: all
Project: ChimeraX

Description

The Mac crash dumps are hard to read in Trac because the "threads" key is one incredibly long line instead of each function call in the stack on its own line. We could have bug reporter format the text of the crash dump before the submitting it. I'll attach an example Mac crash dump file from macOS 15.6.1. Some other sections besides "threads" could also benefit from better formatting.

Attachments (1)

ChimeraX-2025-09-17-122628.ips (104.7 KB ) - added by Tom Goddard 4 weeks ago.
Example macOS 15.6.1 crash report.

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (2)

by Tom Goddard, 4 weeks ago

Example macOS 15.6.1 crash report.

comment:1 by Tom Goddard, 9 days ago

Resolution: fixed
Status: assignedclosed

I improved the appearance of Mac crash report stack traces so the function names are easier to read by adding newlines, tabs and spaces. An example of the crash report appearance is ticket #19092.

I only added white space so it is still pretty ugly. The Mac .ips crash files are almost JSON and I tried opening it as JSON and using Python pprint() but didn't like that approach for a few reasons. First it isn't legal JSON because it has two dictionaries with nothing between them and so the Python json parser gives an error. But if I assume the file is a dictionary on line 1 and then the rest of the lines are a second dictionary the can be read as JSON and pprint'ed. But the pprint output makes each stack function 4 lines instead of 1 line which requires a lot of scrolling. So I think my simple addition of white space without assuming JSON format gave a better result.

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