Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 06/08/2012 15:20, Matthew Paul Thomas a écrit :
>
> That isn't true, unless today is a freak exception. Right now, out of
> the 50 most common errors, only 17 are from services. The rest are
> from applications.
Right, but if you look at e.g jockey issues some are in the backend side 
of the software, anyway let's not argue over numbers, my gut feeling 
from dealing with those bugs since precise is that about half of the 
issues deserve telling the user, the other half are harmless, session 
closing bugs, etc.

If you take a 50%-50% ratio for the sake of the argument with 10 bugs a 
week you can consider that we "spam" users 5 times a week for no good 
reason or that we avoid confusion 5 times a week for them, matter of 
perspective.

We didn't get so many complain in the past about the confusion created 
by the bugs (but maybe they just didn't reach us) but we do get quite 
some for the error dialogs...

>
> I think that is mistaken in three ways.
>
> Most importantly, Ubuntu 12.04.1 does not mark the end of updates to
> 12.04. There will be more SRUs. Hopefully some of those will make
> 12.04 more reliable. If we're unlucky, others may make it less
> reliable. If the latter happens, how will you know?
The same way we did until precise, sure it's less ideal but as said it's 
a cost-benefit ratio and if we don't invest significant resources into 
actively fixing stable I don't see it moving enough for the datas to 
provide a benefit over what they cost us.

>
> Second, the kind of people who install 12.04.1 (or buy a computer with
> it installed) may have noticably different behavior from the kind of
> people who installed 12.04 -- using different applications and
> features, and encountering errors at different rates.
Right, again what's the point to know about issues and bother users if 
we do nothing about them because we don't have resources allocated to 
deal with them?

> And third, there may be time-based problems that people using 12.04
> can't have encountered yet (unless their clock was set wrong).
Right, it's not optimal, but we didn't have that system until precise 
and we somewhat managed to do fine, I'm sure we could deal without it 
for another release.

>
>
> I didn't say it prevents you from getting error reports from 12.10. I
> said it prevents you from seeing whether 12.10 is better or worse than
> 12.04. By "12.04" I include 12.04.1 and any later updates.

I don't think we need exact numbers to compare 12.10 to 12.04.1+, we 
know about the current state of 12.04.1 and the release team should set 
a goal, e.g "the medium submission rate should be lower than 1.3 for 
quantal". While we are doing time based released anyway those goals will 
need to be hard ones, we can't block on all parameter you need a 
variable to adjust, either let slip on goals or on time...

>> The main concern is that only a small fraction of those are user
>> visible issue.
> How do you know?
I've been watching errors.ubuntu.com since precise release, dispatching 
a good number of the top issues and following up with assigned people, 
we have a good understanding of most of the bugs we fixed, when they 
happen and what's the impact.


> If they are harmless, why do they need fixing at all? If they really
> don't, that error message in particular could be suppressed.
They don't, that's my point, we shouldn't bother users about those, but 
our system is not smart enough at the moment to tell them apport from 
important issues.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher