Apport in stable releases [was: Re: Do you really want developers to be on this list]

[Martin Olsson]

Scott Kitterman wrote:
> We'd be flooded with stacks of dupes mostly to existing bugs 
> and no one to triage, let alone fix them.

In their current form dupes are mostly annoying, but what if the
apport was redesigned so that it had a "production mode" where it
only bumped a counter on the original report. Then we would be
able to run queries like

	"which single sigsegv among all sigsegvs in all packages
	 does users currently run into most frequently".

To do this the "production mode" apport data does not have to
contain core dumps with personal data, it just needs to submit
a small tuple containing the parameters that we use to determine
the uniqueness of a crash. An example of such a tuple could be:

	(HASH_OF_ELF_IMAGE, OFFSET_INTO_ELF_IMAGE_WHERE_SEGV_HAPPENED)

Since Ubuntu has more bugs than developers, this type of prioritization
data might be very useful. Also, on the topic of "interfering with local
development"; other vendors have tried to solve this by asking
"SUBMIT CRASH, DONT SUBMIT CRASH or DEBUG" whenever developer tools are
installed. And SUBMIT or DONT SUBMIT whenever devs tools are not installed.


Martin