[Desktop12.04-Topic] Handling Failure Gracefully

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Tue, 2011-10-25 at 09:56 -0400, Robert Ancell wrote:
> Late topic...
> 
> In the real world there are always going to be failures, triggered by
> things like software bugs, hardware failures and misconfiguration. 
> Ubuntu should where possible handle common failures and provide
> predictable feedback to the user that the system is broken.
> 
> I think we have the intention that most of this should work already, but
> it would be good to check we've worked out the right failures to handle
> and to methodically test they all work in 12.10.
> 
> Some common failure cases and what should happen:
> - Failure to start X server - Run failsafe X server
> - Failure to start any X server - Show error on text console
> - Failure to start greeter - Run X server with error message
> - Failure to start session - Return to greeter with error message
> - Failure of compiz/unity during session - restart compiz/unity
> - Failure to start application - show error message
> - ...

Yes.  This is an important aspect of system robustness that I don't
think we've generally paid a lot of attention to.

At the last UDS(?) Bryce and I got together with Colin Watson and
discussed a subset of this problem - around what kernel options the GRUB
recovery mode should set, and when recordfail (to automatically show the
GRUB menu next boot) should be cleared.

I'd be very interested in having a broader discussion about this.
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