Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 07/08/2012 08:14, Steve Langasek a écrit :
>
>
> If there was this much disparity between the rate of error dialogs and the
> rate of SRU bug fixes, it would have been nice to make this a focus for
> 12.04.1 work.  But that's water under the bridge now.
It has been defined as a focus and several people tried to keep a 
dynamic around fixing bugs from the list (thanks mvo, the s-c team for 
their efforts in that regard), desktop has been reviewing the list 
regularly and dispatching most important bugs as resources permitted, 
the issue is that the resources are limited and we didn't make the 
progresses we wanted.

>
>
> errors.ubuntu.com currently shows an average number of crashes per day of
> 1.39, which I agree is unreasonably high.  But this number doesn't reflect:
>
>   - users who experienced no crashes
>   - users who experienced crashes that they chose not to report
- the fact that apport stop nagging about,reporting issues after 3 
instances to not "spam" the user with dialogs, which in practice means 
the datas become less useful on installed systems over time and the most 
frequent issues stop being reported by existing users (they still come 
through from new installs though)

>
> I don't know what sources you're alleging are unmaintained here.  If these
> are packages that are contributing substantially to the daily error rate
> across all our entire userbase, then they're almost all going to be packages
> in main, and those are not unmaintained.  If the level of maintenance hasn't
> led to an adequate reduction in the number of python exceptions, I think
> that's because this hasn't been made a priority - and that doesn't surprise
> me since this wasn't brought up as a problem before now.
Taking the list for this month and bugs with at least 10 reports a day, 
which makes 285 entries, the packages with at least 5 lines in that set are:
(the numbers are the numbers of different issues by source, not the 
number of reports, e.g: jockey has 24 different bugs on the top list)
     129 software-center <- actively maintained
      57 update-manager <- not unmaintained but got 6 bugs fixed since 
precise in SRUs
      24 jockey <- 0 SRU
      18 unity
      18 aptdaemon <- 1 SRU, fixing 4 bugs since precise
      16 software-properties <- 1 SRU, 1 bug fixed since precise
      12 sessioninstaller <- 1 SRU, 1 bug fixed since precise
      12 gwibber
      12 apport
      10 unity-lens-video
      10 rhythmbox
       9 compiz
       8 update-notifier
       8 ubuntuone-client
       8 oneconf
       8 emesene
       8 blueman <- unmaintained, has one of the most frequent error 
unaddressed
       7 indiv-screenlets
       6 vlc
       6 ubuntu-sso-client
       6 colord
       5 apt-xapian-index

I don't mean to pick on anyone there by looking at those I pointed:

- update-manager is unmaintained by the Ubuntu teams, mvo as the 
historical maintainer is fixing some issues on best efforts but clearly 
doesn't have the time to look at all those issues
- jockey is virtually unmaintained, deprecated in quantal and pitti with 
his role change didn't get much of a chance to SRU it
- aptdaemon is basically in the same situation than update-manager, 
glatzor is doing good job working on it but nobody has been taking up on 
SRUing fixes
- software-properties is virtually unmaintained (the 1 bug fixed is 
because we tried to dispatch some of the issues from the list in the 
desktop team and Didier fixed one)
- sessioninstaller is the same story than software-properties, 
unmaintained, mterry fixed one issue from the top list but that's about it
- update-notifier, same...
- apt-xapian-index, same...

You can claim that those are maintained but in practice that would be 
misleading, from the list it seems like having mvo moving to new 
challenges is what hurts us the most here, we should probably discuss 
how to better maintain our "package management tools" set

>
> Without committing to any particular solution yet, I think we need to first
> come up with an objective metric of what we think is an acceptable user
> experience, then figure out what it takes to achieve that, and decide if we
> think that's feasible.
>
>>> Turning whoopsie off for precise leaves users without an explanation
>>> when any kind of application failure occurs. It means that we cannot
>>> measure stability of 12.10 against 12.04. It completely leaves us in
>>> the dark on the state of 12.04 after the .1 release. It's really going
>>> at the messenger with a hatchet.
>> That's what we have been doing for 8 years, it's not perfect but
>> it's not the end of the world, I guess we could do it for another
>> release?
> What would prevent this same argument from being made in another 6 months'
> time about 12.10?  Furthermore, 12.04 being an LTS, it *is* supposed to
> remain a target of bugfixing for some time to come; if errors.ubuntu.com is
> providing important information about what our bugfixing priorities should
> be, then that's true for LTS SRUs as much as it is elsewhere, and we should
> carefully weigh the loss of that information.
I don't see a good reason we would made the same argument for 12.10, I'm 
mostly pushing there because:

- the system is young and still has flaws, those are being addressed and 
should lees in an issue by 12.10 time
- it's an LTS and perception matters especially for those

I would push for not turning it off from 12.10 because I agree it's good 
to have the system running and from there I think the benefits will be 
greater than the cost

> In practice, are the dialogs shown on login after shutdown the main problem?
> If so, there might be a way to mitigate this particular problem without
> hobbling whoopsie entirely.
>
I don't know if they are the main problem, they are a source of 
annoyance and user spamming for sure though (and yeah, stopping those 
would be nice)

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher