Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Sebastien Bacher wrote on 02/08/12 22:31:
> ...
> 
> 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

Maybe 12.04 is more stable than any previous version of Ubuntu. Maybe
it is more stable than Fedora, or Suse, or Debian. But you don't know
that, precisely because those other OSes don't have this kind of error
reporting. So how do you know that "the feeling that precise is
unstable" is not actually justified?

An average of 1.4 crashes/user/calendar-day is far too high.
Suppressing the error messages won't fix that. Only fixing the errors
will.

> (it seems often qualified to buggier over previous release for no 
> reason out of the number of error dialogs showing up to report 
> bugs).

They don't show up to report bugs. (That's not even an option, unless
you've altered crashdb.conf.) They show up to explain why something
just went wrong -- and, if it was an application crashing, to let you
relaunch it.

> 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

- - It makes relaunching a crashed application much easier.
- - From the next errors.ubuntu.com rollout, it will let release
managers and other contributors see whether Ubuntu Q is more reliable
than 12.04.

> Con:
> 
> - it's showing up too often and giving the impression to users that
> the system is buggy
> 
> ...

With previous versions of Ubuntu, windows would disappear or features
would stop working, and people wouldn't know why. The only difference
is that now the failure comes with an explanation. It would be best if
the failure didn't occur at all, but if it does, it's better for it to
be explained than to be mysterious.

Turning off error reporting would leave the release team ignorant
about whether 12.10 is an improvement on 12.04. But this is not a
release-team-specific question. It would make Ubuntu developers in
general less productive, and it would make Ubuntu worse for end users.

If you think there are ways the end-user presentation can be improved,
I'm happy to take suggestions. Routing around that by asking the
release team to disable it altogether is not cool.


Martin Pitt wrote on 03/08/12 03:46:
> 
> Apport as it was on precise (and still is in Quantal) has not 
> really been designed for usage in a stable release. For example, 
> the rate limitation should be a lot more aggressive in stables,

The rate limitation should be removed altogether, because it's causing
some crashes to go unexplained. (It's also skewing the statistics,
though that's less important.)

> and we need to do something about the presentation of crashes that 
> are not obviously connected to the UI, such as crashes in threads 
> and respawned services.
> 
> ...

Currently we're incorrectly showing the application crash alert for a
thread crash. The thread crash alert includes an "Ignore future
problems of this type" checkbox, which should alleviate that problem.
Hopefully this can be fixed in an SRU.

- -- 
mpt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAlAfpMYACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecp7TACfdbHlvsfAnWIXeiHnSjB9ApiH
MVMAoKGvf+ti+P4a8EIbFiChiBUTkD5E
=VzFr
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----