Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Didier Roche]

Le 06/08/2012 19:49, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at canonical.com> wrote:
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>> Sebastien Bacher wrote on 06/08/12 12:48:
>>> 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
>> 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.
> Isn't that _reported_ errors? Do you have any numbers for error popups
> that have been dismissed? Personally, I almost always dismiss the
> system error popups. They are vaguely worded and usually for the same
> problem in mission-control. The application errors, on the other hand,
> are upfront about what is broken. It's likely I have just seen that
> application crashing. I know (and care about) whatever is going on.
> Oh, it also helps that lots of background stuff loves to crash during
> shutdown / suspend / resume (resulting in crash popups when I log in),
> while application crash popups are at slightly less annoying, and more
> meaningful, moments. I'm willing to accept that I could be an
> exception, but I suspect the numbers of reported errors might be
> biased in this way.
>
> I don't run a computer lab, but I did upgrade someone's computer to
> Ubuntu 12.04. A few days later, I felt like a total jerk as I stepped
> him through disabling error popups using terminal commands. (I think
> he opened xterm instead of gnome-terminal, too). After that, he has
> been very happy with the system. It isn't that he doesn't like
> helping: he just doesn't want to be bothered about it, at random, by
> some popup that reads like the sky is falling. He has work to do, and
> he likes to focus on it rather than his computer. That's why he
> switched to Ubuntu a few years ago.
>
That's exactly a similar feedback that I received from the french 
community. I was first surprised when, shortly after the release, people 
mentioned precise as a "disaster", the "less stable release we ever 
had", or again "shameful LTS" (vaguely translated from the French 
forum). I also saw people reinstall back 11.10.

I only understand at a booth when people complained about the crash 
dialog report and that it was the cause of this low quality perception. 
Multiple cause on that:
- the crash is nagging them everyday, multiple times a day. "Why again 
do you nag me about apps xxxx crashing even if I reported it three 
times?". We are basically shooting in our feets and until we are ready 
to deal with every crash report (and it was useful at the very beginning 
of the released version), now we are just about to continue bothering 
the user without having the man power to fix issues behind.
- then, most of the dialog seems to be dismissed, so as Dylan was 
telling, this is not completely a good metric and only showing a small 
part of the reality. With time, people are reporting less and less, so 
even if we saw less crash reports on whoopsie for the LTS, we can't go 
to any conclusion.
- some people think that whoopsie/apport is buggy. Indeed, they saw the 
dialog about software-center crashing and still see the ui (even 
updating). So "no, it didn't crash, I won't report that crash". I will 
concure what was already told on the thread: this is really useful and 
important to give feedback when something happens (like an X application 
crashing) and telling "sorry" as well as giving them a way to restart 
the application, however, there are too many cases when it seems to only 
impact a background service, and even if it impacts the ui (like you 
have to click again a button to get your results as the service 
interrupted), I don't think that users stopped on that. They would 
prefer clicking again than reporting a crash in addition to this click. 
Also note that the crash dialog doesn't give any clue on how to get to 
the wanted action. It just adds one more step from the user perspective 
(even if it reports us useful data) with no obvious clue for them.
- the most important point in my opinion is that we are making the user 
paying the price about the error. We are interrupting them when they are 
using application X (or even maybe when they are watching a video on 
youtube/totem) and popping up about "hey, the service Y crashed, do you 
want to report it?". I guess this is my major issue about the problem 
and really expecting your work on batching the error reports in a 
sensible way to fix it. However until it's there and is SRUed to the 
LTS, I'm really in favor of turning whoopsie off by default in the LTS.

Thanks,
Didier