Automatic crash reports in the final release

[Soren Hansen]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 10:06:08AM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> (1) Flip /etc/default/apport to 'off'. Bug triagers can ask submitters
> to switch it on again when they can reproduce a crash and proved to be
> communicative.

As far as I can see, the flow of that would be:
1) File bug manually
2) Wait for a triager to stop by, instruct the user to do whatever is
   is necessary to reenable apport (currently not very easy for
   novices).
3) Hope that it's easily reproducible, reproduce it, and have apport
   notice the crash.
4) Have apport create a new bug with the core dumps and whatnot
5) Have the user close the old bug, and start all over again with the
   new one.

This is overly complex IMHO. Steps 4 and 5 could be fixed by adding an
option apport to let it update an existing bug. Step 2 could be helped
by providing some sort of UI for enabling apport.

Overall, I don't particularly like this solution.

> (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.

I like this much better. Two things, though: Maybe a cron.weekly job to
remove old crash reports lying around so that we don't fill up people's
hard drives with crash reports they're never going to use, but also leave
them around for long enough to give them a chance to report the bug.
Also, if it's not already there (don't remember), apport should show the
time at which the crash happened so that the user can recognize the
particular crash when running apport after the fact.

> Thanks in advance for your feedback,

Thanks for this wicked cool tool! \o/

-- 
| Soren Hansen    | Linux2Go                  | http://Linux2Go.dk/ |
| Seniorkonsulent | Lindholmsvej 42, 2. TH    | +45 46 90 26 42     |
| sh at linux2go.dk  | 9400 Norresundby, Denmark | GPG key: E8BDA4E3   |
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