Automatic crash reports in the final release

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le vendredi 30 mars 2007 à 10:06 +0200, Martin Pitt a écrit :

> Unhandled Python Exceptions
> ===========================
> 
> They have no considerable impact on network bandwidth, or CPU/memory
> resources when processing them, always have perfect stack traces, and
> it should not be hard to develop a tool to automatically mark them as
> duplicates.  Personally I find them very helpful, too.

I've no strong opinion on those, they are partially responsive for the
bug flood created by apport though and I'm not sure on how many new
exceptions we will get during the stable cycle which have not been
reported yet


> Signal crashes (mostly SIGSEGV)
> ===============================

> There were differing opinions about the usefulness of crash reports
> for stable releases (e. g. Seb feared the flood, Alexander rather
> prefered to get reports). Can we please collect and weigh them
> here?
> 
> My personal one: It is neither our policy nor do we have the resources
> to fix a significant number of crashes in stable releases. When we
> keep apport turned on in the development release, we should have
> gotten reports about the more important ones already, and we have a
> lot of fodder to grind through now in Malone. So I would prefer to
> disable it by default.

I agree with the, we already don't cope with the number of crashes sent,
having non-debug backtrace not working correctly doesn't make it easy to
close duplicates quickly and most of common crashers have already been
reported by now.

> (2) Keep apport itself enabled and have it stuff the dumps into
>     /var/crash, but disable the automatic frontend invocation in
>     update-notifier. This means a wasted processing overhead for
>     the vast majority of the crashes that will happen out there, but
>     the crash reports are retained, so that manually calling
>     apport-{gtk,qt,cli} will continue to work as usual. We could even
>     add a gconf key and a UI somewhere to re-enable it.

That looks good, it doesn't get in the user way and is easy to use


Cheers,

Sebastien Bacher