Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey,

That's something quite some people raised as an issue since precise, the 
frequent whoopsie dialogs in the LTS gives users the feeling that 
precise is unstable (it seems often qualified to buggier over previous 
release for no reason out of the number of error dialogs showing up to 
report bugs).

I've discussed the issue with different people in different teams, here 
is my try to a summary of the pro and con:

Pro:
- it gives us infos on what issues users run into
- it gives feedback to users on what happen when a program close while 
they are using it

Con:
- it's showing up too often and giving the impression to users that the 
system is buggy
- it's often showing programming errors which don't impact users 
(untracked exception from python softwares or services by example), what 
users get the most notified about is glitchs about things like ubuntuone 
services, oneconf, software-center ... most of those are not user 
visible issues and the frontend would handle the glitches fine without 
whoopsie notifying the users
- errors.ubuntu.com is not good enough yet that we can properly tackle 
those issues
- we don't have the resources to get where we want to be in a short 
timeframe, we are working on it but meanwhile we are impacting users for 
things we don't make real use for

I know that most of the cons are addressable but until we do address 
them the consensus form the people I talked to seems to be that the 
cost-benefit is largely not in our favour at this point so I would 
recommend we do disable it by default for 12.04.1 to minimize LTS 
annoyance and keep it enable from now on for new release (on the basis 
that the system will improve enough that we can catch up and that the 
perception issues is a bit less of an issue on a non LTS)

Just to give some details about the errors.ubuntu.com issues mentioned 
before (I think people are going to ask what are the problems at some 
point so I can as well reply to that here):
- it's not possible to filter out issues which have been resolved from 
the list (so it's hard to know what has been worked on and what needs 
work still)
- it's not possible to say what issue happens to what version and get 
stats of instances of the bugs by version, i.e to get datas on whether 
the situation improved or not for a bug
- some of our engineers have issues login into the system to get access 
to the infos they need to work on the bugs, that situation is still not 
resolved after some months
- other small issues, but I don't want to turn that email into a "list 
what is wrong currently", especially when we have people knowing about 
those and working on improving the situation

I would add that Evan did an amazing job so far and that 
errors.ubuntu.com has been proved very useful already (we fixed at least 
an hundred bugs, most wouldn't have show up in this way using launchpad) 
so the email is not again that work, we just feel that the current 
status of the system and the resources allocated to fixing those bugs 
gives us a situation where the benefit is not sufficient to justify the 
cost on the Ubuntu image.

What do people think about turning whoopsie off for 12.04.1?

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher