RFC: Automatic trouble reporting

[Johan Walles]

Hi!

I've been thinking about automatic trouble reporting, like what is done 
by Windows, OpenOffice and Mozilla.

As the saying goes, you can't fix what you can't measure.

Currently all "measurements" of trouble with user's systems are sent in 
manually through either the Bugzilla or the mailing lists.  The 
downside of this is that people are lazy, and a lot of things won't be 
reported.

Automatically measuring problems on user systems would make it possible 
to find out (for problems that can be caught automatically) what kinds 
of problems are common and what aren't.  This information could be used 
to focus developer time.

The downside of this would be that the reports won't contain as much 
information as manual reports, and asking for more information won't 
really be feasible.  Thus, automatic trouble reports should be seen as 
a complement to manual ones, not a replacement.

Examples of things that can be automatically measured on user systems 
are programs that crash (crashing binary, its package, what version, 
possibly a stack trace) and anything that goes into the system logs.

I am aware of that automatic problem reports are controversial.  A lot 
of people don't want to give up information on their system, so IMO any 
automatic trouble reporting system must be off by default, and it 
should require some level of manual intervention to switch on.  It must 
not be possible for anybody to enable automatic trouble reports by 
mistake.

Obviously somebody needs to do some implementing.  Who should do that 
and how is a later issue IMO, the first issue is whether this is a good 
idea and what information would be useful.

What I'm hoping for with this e-mail is feedback on what people think.  
Is this a good idea in general?  What things could be measured?  What 
things should be measured?

If the feedback is positive, the hows and the whos can be discussed.  
If this is considered a stupid idea, discussing the hows and the whos 
would be rather pointless.

Comments appreciated.

  Regards //Johan


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