Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 06/08/2012 13:04, Matthew Paul Thomas a écrit :


> - - It makes relaunching a crashed application much easier.
Right, most of the issues we get are with services and not applications 
though
> - - 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.
I never suggested turning of whoopsie in Q, so we will get metrics in Q 
in any case. We have metrics from precise at release time and .1 time, 
that should be good enough to know where Q stands. I don't think lacking 
a metrics on 12.04.1 post .1 compared to Q is a big deal, the LTS 
shouldn't change much, we want to know where Q stands though and we will 
know since we will keep the system running for it.

>
> 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.
That's again assuming that the errors we received are real bugs having 
an user visible impact, it's true in some cases but I would challenge 
that being the most frequent case, we have been looking at those errors 
for 3 months and most of them are bugs reported against services, or 
happening at session closing, or harmless exception uncaught in python 
programs.

>
> 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.
The suggestion is to turn if off for 12.04.1, can you explain how it 
prevents us to get metrics on 12.10?
>
> 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.

Evan said that work was ongoing on "batching reports to submit several 
together", that will be good. I don't think there is magical ways around 
it otherwise, it's just that 10 bugs a week is too much errors dialog 
popping up. The main concern is that only a small fraction of those are 
user visible issue.

To take an example a non marginal number of issues happen on session 
closing, they are due to the fact that our desktop session management is 
not really good. That's a known issue, will not be fixed in the LTS (the 
scope of the work is not appropriate for stable updates), and is 
harmless ... still it means lot of users get a "system error happened" 
dialog first thing after next login. That has a real cost in user 
perception, the benefit we get back is null though ...


Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher