Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Stéphane Graber]

On 08/02/2012 05:31 PM, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> 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

Thanks Sebastien for raising the issue.

My point of view on the matter is that whoopsie is a great tool, sending
us amazing data that we're only starting to see how to use.
I really think we should do anything we can to keep it running on all
releases.

Now, that being said, my point of view on the user experience is that it
sucks, sorry for being a bit harsh here, but let me tell you what
happens when I login on most of my 12.04 machines (thankfully I seem to
have the buggiest ones so it hasn't been a problem for my friends and
relatives).

 1) Boot the machine
 2) Login
 3) Get what looks like a perfectly well working desktop
 4) For the next 10 to 15 minutes, getting random apport prompts for
everything that blew up since "I don't know when (usually last reboot)"

4) is especially annoying as these are clearly old crashes that apport
for some reason didn't pick up when they happened and have been stacking
in /var/crash. I'm guessing some of these happened during session switch
or when I wasn't running a desktop environment.

In such case I'd expect apport to show me a list of everything that
crashed (all 10 of them) and let me just tick the ones I want to submit
and then be done with the lot in one go.

Instead, I get a flood of apport processes killing my CPU for 15min
randomly popping up windows, some asking for my password and some just
showing the apport window.

I see a few obvious things that might have already been reported as bugs
and that if we want to keep whoopsie enabled for 12.04, we should
probably fix (with any needed post-release UIFe be granted by the
release team if needed):

 - Either support easy bulk reporting of crashes by showing a single
window to the user OR flush /var/crash at boot time to workaround the
problem.
 - Fix the authentication code so I don't need to enter my password
every single time a system service explodes, using the same delay as
sudo would be reasonable I guess.

On top of that, though likely more for 12.10 than 12.04, I think we
might benefit from a few tweaks into the way whoopsie/apport work:
 - Add a link from the crash dialog to the whoopsie settings in g-c-c,
so the user can easily turn it off or change the settings.
 - Add a mode where the user is never prompted on crashes but can choose
to start apport when they want to look at all the crashes and send them
at that time (with the same bulk submission UI I mentioned earlier).
 - Add a setting to always silently report crashes to whoopsie. This
mode would be bad from a security point of view and I'm sure a lot of
our users wouldn't want that, but some may still use that rather than
turning whoopsie off completely.


I realize now isn't the perfect time to discuss fairly intrusive
behaviour and UI changes and that bugs during the past cycle or UDS
sessions would been more appropriate, though sadly I only started
noticing these post-release when I stopped rebooting my 12.04 systems
every couple of days and started using it as "production" systems.

-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com

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