RFC: Automatic trouble reporting

[Johan Walles]

As you say, bug-buddy covers only Gnome.  If anything non-Gnome crashes 
it won't help.  For example if the X server crashes, bug-buddy won't be 
of much help, but that's something you'd probably want to know about.  
And if any non-supported Gnome software crashes, what happens with the 
bug report?

With an automatic statistics gathering system, you could see that a lot 
of your users run Foobar, even though that isn't part of the official 
distro, and that it crashes a lot.  This could indicate that maybe 
you'd want to look into supporting Foobar in the future.

Bug-buddy also requires a non-trivial amout of manual interaction.  
Thus, it just lowers the threshold for filing bug reports manually, it 
doesn't remove it.  Newbie users won't be able to report any crashes, 
with or without Bug-buddy, but with a non-interactive system they would.

Another problem with Bug-buddy is that it doesn't gather any 
information about the system logs, so you won't get any notifications 
on kernel oopses and such (which users may not even notice but you 
might still be interested in).

Regarding Bugzilla, it is (IMO) a very nice tool for manual bug 
reporting, but it isn't very well suited for statistics gathering.  It 
won't answer the question "which program in Ubuntu crashes the most?" 
or "Was the new release of X.Org's ATI driver any better than the 
previous one?".

On the server side, I imagine the results should be presented as a 
high-score list, roughly like Debian's Popularity contest.  That would 
give you a "profile" of what parts of Ubuntu need attention.

  Regards //Johan

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Waugh <jeff.waugh at ubuntu.com>
To: ubuntu-devel at lists.ubuntu.com
Sent: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 20:17:15 +1100
Subject: Re: RFC: Automatic trouble reporting

<quote who="Johan Walles">

> 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?

We can do this for a huge proportion of our desktop software with 
GNOME's
bug-buddy, but we have to fix up both bug-buddy and bugzilla.ubuntu.com 
to
do the right thing with reports. That's really the only reason why we 
don't
have it running already.

(we're not doing a huge amount of work on bugzilla because we're 
planning to
move to a new, super-dooper system relatively soon.)

- Jeff

--
linux.conf.au 2005: Canberra, Australia                
http://linux.conf.au/

       "Have you ever kissed a girl?" - Bryan Cantrill to Dave Miller

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