When a reftest run fails, automation.py prints out "process crash" information saying "Main app process exited normally" and dumping thread information from the crash dump. This isn't useful information (as I understand it), confuses new contributors, and clutters up tinderbox's suggestions since they are considered errors.

This patch makes automation.py use the string "PROCESS-EXPECTED-CRASH" instead of "PROCESS-CRASH", and skip the stack trace printing, in the case of a normal process exit when a dump file is found. This log shows the change in action on a real crash (i.e., still outputting "PROCESS-CRASH"): http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showlog.cgi?tree=MozillaTry&errorparser=unittest&logfile=1301273189.1301275223.13571.gz&buildtime=1301273189&buildname=Rev3%20WINNT%205.1%20tryserver%20debug%20test%20reftest&fulltext= This log shows the change in action on a reftest failure but without a real crash (outputting "PROCESS-EXPECTED-CRASH"): http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showlog.cgi?log=MozillaTry/1301261698.1301264338.6371.gz&fulltext=1

Comment on attachment 522266 [details] [diff] [review] Make automation.py output quieter for expected process exits No, we can't do this. We really do want to dump those (sometimes), because if the plugin process crashes unexpectedly, we want to get a stack. What we really want to do here is to have the tests that are intentionally crashing the plugin process clean up after themselves, so that there aren't minidumps laying around from crashes that we intentionally triggered. I totally agree that this is way too noisy, and we need to fix it, but we can't unilaterally ignore plugin process crashes.

I filed that recently as bug 642175, FWIW.

OK, following up there.