The need for apport hooks

[Chris Coulson]

On 06/08/11 23:46, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> In any case, these types of reports post-release are most useful in
> aggregate rather than as individual bug reports. If they were filed in
> some ultra simple crash database (with no signup required of the user)
> we could get most of the value without incurring a lot of extra bug
> labor. Bryce 

Something like https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/ ?

- It doesn't require users to sign up
- It collects duplicates together
- Reports can be filtered by product / version / date
- Provides some interesting statistics (eg, "Top Changers" is pretty
useful for spotting issues early, and rate of crashes per user)
- Can associate bug reports with crash signatures
- The user can check back on reports they submitted (about:crashes in
Firefox will show you this)

Also, Breakpad (which is the client software) makes it easy to submit
crashes from Firefox and Thunderbird - the crash dialog has a checkbox
to enable this, a text area to enter relevant information (which is
sometimes used to enter various profanities) and a way to provide an
e-mail address (kept private on the server).

We actually use Breakpad for Firefox and Thunderbird in Ubuntu already,
rather than Apport - primarily so upstream have some visibility of
crashes from Ubuntu users.

Regards
Chris