On Jul 21, 2026, at 3:40 PM, Brian Julin <BJulin@clarku.edu> wrote:
I think there are two factors that keep people from doing so, and both share the same root cause:
I'm not so sure. I think a major reason for not posting the debug output is a belief that it won't be helpful. * "I don't know which parts are relevant, so I didn't post it" * "I read it, and I didn't see anything that seemed relevant, so I didn't post it". The analogy here is someone having car trouble. No one has car trouble, and then tells their mechanic: * Hey, my car's acting funny. But I'm not going to tell you what's going on. You're the mechanic, you figure it out! * I brought my car in, but I'm not sure what you need to know. So I'm going to leave my car locked in the parking lot, and get angry when you tell me that you need to look under the hood.
the debug information is usually an immense really ugly looking thing that A) they would not normally post on a discussion/chat for fear of being "messy", and most people these days grew up with discussions/chats so they view a mailing list through that lens and B) Is full of details about what is most often a component of security infrastructure, where there is a concern about exposure requiring them to consider how to redact some details, some of which may not be amenable to a simple search/replace.
For (A), I would expect that people read the documentation which says "POST ALL OF THE DEBUG OUTPUT". Sadly, that expectant is often wrong. Even worse, I have no idea *where* we need to add more documentation, so that people will find it and read it. From what I can tell, there is a non-negligible set of people who have religious objections to reading documentation. For (B), I would expect that people be able to read the debug output for things they care about. e.g. secrets, IP addresses, etc. Even if you don't understand the output, it should be trivial to use "grep" to search for things. Or, people should be capable of setting up test accounts with fake names. But that don't happen, either.
Some sort of interactive post-processor for the debug input to pretty it up, clean out the true cruft, perform redactions/aliasing on any exposed server names or addresses, and maybe point out a few common issues if it sees them... might be a worthwhile endeavor.
That would be nice, but at this point no one is going to contribute it. The people who need it won't write it, and the people who don't need it are busy with other things. Alan DeKok.