Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Sebastien Bacher wrote on 06/08/12 17:27:
> ...
> 
> Let me change the angle of my suggestion, and say "we can't keep 
> the LTS with that number of error prompts", that's my position.
> 
> ...

In an ideal world, there would be no alert boxes of any sort. I look
forward to the time when people using Ubuntu can go for weeks without
seeing an error message, whether from whoopsie or anything else.

But optimizing purely for the number of error prompts is the wrong
goal. The situations we're discussing are situations where *something
has already gone wrong*. We then have a choice between explaining what
went wrong, or leaving it a mystery.

It may be hard for Ubuntu contributors to appreciate the need to
explain what just went wrong, because Ubuntu contributors are
self-selected to be familiar with the situation where errors go
unexplained. And so instead you focus on things like how many people
will be working on fixing errors in 12.04.1. But that isn't actually
relevant to the choice of whether to explain errors to users or not.

Now, you propose that so few of the crashes in Ubuntu 12.04.1 need to
be explained, that *none* of them should be. But you haven't provided
any data to support this. The claim that most crashes are in services
isn't supported by the evidence. (Of the most common reported errors,
yesterday 17/50 were; today only 7/50 were.)

If we can isolate particular classes of error that we can be confident
don't need explaining, then great! Let's not show an error prompt for
those. (We could batch up the error reports, and send them next time
an error occurs that does need to be explained.) For example, perhaps
you could describe how to identify errors that happened at logout or
shutdown.

Cheers
- -- 
mpt
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