Auto-save logcat during installation

[Tungstwenty]

It would be useful to have some logic on the Installer (potentially optional) to help obtain better troubleshooting info with less effort from non-tech users.
One of these would be storing the logcat while doing a soft-reboot, so it can then be posted or shared.

A process can be spawned on the background with nohup to avoid getting it killed when the zygote process tree restarts:
nohup .../logcat_grabber.sh &

logcat_grabber.sh could contain:

logcat -v time > .../logcat.log
CHILD_PID=$!
sleep <reasonable seconds to wait for the boot(loop)>
kill $CHILD_PID

Actually, check http://stackoverflow.com/a/2387538 for some additional safety to prevent killing the child in case some other process has already reused its pid.

[rovo89]

That's a good idea, I think it would help to get better logs.

One idea on SO is to use the "timeout" command. It's also part of BusyBox (just not enabled in our version), so we could be sure that we get the expected behavior. I'd prefer that over a script that might be interpreted differently, depending on things like the installed shell.

I would probably make this optional, maybe with a target path that could be chosen by the user (to make it easier for them to share it). When enabled, we might want to disable options like installation via recovery, full reboot etc. to ensure that normal installation + soft reboot is used.