Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Dylan McCall wrote on 06/08/12 18:49:
> 
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas
> <mpt at canonical.com> ...
>> 
>> 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?

Dismissing the error alert sends an error report by default. Because
no extra effort is required, we can be confident that errors reported
are fairly representative of errors occurring.

Errors go unreported if you log out without dismissing the alert, if
you uncheck the checkbox before dismissing the alert, if your admin
has blocked error reporting in System Settings, or if there's a bug in
Apport or Whoopsie. We don't have numbers on unreported errors because
they are, you know, unreported. :-)

> 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.

Until yesterday I didn't know that error alerts were appearing for
errors that occurred in the previous session. It isn't appropriate to
prompt about those (unless they directly caused the session exit). So
what we need now is a way to distinguish those from the rest.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/1033932>

> ...
> 
> PS: For what it's worth, Microsoft's Action Centre thing from
> Windows 7 might actually be an interesting model for this. It is
> mostly a useless thing that nags people to set up backups, but it
> also has a nice bit that lists collected system errors. It's useful
> to actually diagnose problems that are occurring. In Ubuntu all we
> seem to do is nag the user to report errors (which are promptly
> forgotten), and there's no real sense of getting something back for
> the trouble. What if that data was aggregated locally, too, so a
> user could see that a particular component is crashing really
> frequently? Or report issues from crash popups that had been
> previously dismissed? It might make the whole thing more agreeable
> ;)

We've planned a "Show Previous Reports" button in the settings panel,
that goes to a Web page listing the reports you've sent.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#previous>

And eventually, the error alert will be able to invite you to install
updates because an update is available that fixes the specific problem.
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#updates>

- -- 
mpt

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