Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Martin Pitt]

Hello all,

sorry for the late answer, just returned from holidays.

Steve Langasek [2012-08-06 23:14 -0700]:
> In an earlier message, Martin spoke of whoopsie being a "great experiment".

For the "experiment" part I was referring to keeping Apport enabled in
a stable release. We did not really know how many and which kind of
issues we would get before we actually did it. Now we have a much
better idea, and besides those numbers we now also know how much
effort it is to keep up with fixing the "top ten" crashers, as well as
the situations where the crash popups are useless and unnerving (e. g.
crashes that happen during logout, multiple system crashes from
respawning services, etc.)

> If we can't quickly answer these questions, I think that's a strong argument
> for turning whoopsie off *until we can*, with the intent of re-enabling it
> once we're sure that we're on track.  Yes, that would be a setback for
> gathering data about the most severe bugs; but the doubt here is about what
> it's costing us (in terms of user experience) to gather that data and
> whether we're making effective use of it in practice, and that's something
> it's really important for us to know.  Just as long as we bear in mind that
> the goal is to work out the kinks and get it re-enabled - among other
> things, whoopsie is crucial to us improving our SRU process, and that
> definitely requires it to be on in stable releases.

I fully agree. However, this only catches one aspect of the problem.
Of course this will be vastly useful for the SRUs that we'll do, but
it will be mostly noise and false expectations for the crashes that we
won't fix in stables (which will be the majority). After 12.04.1 there
won't be a dedicated team any more, and all but the most common
crashes will just stay as they are.

So perhaps one possible compromise would be to only show crashes for
packages in -proposed and -updates? This would limit the reports to
the set of packages that we are still actively working on and would
retain the whoopsie funcionality for pending SRUs, but would silence
it for the vast majority of packages which we don't fix any more in
precise anyway.

> > No, they are normal non technical users who get 5 prompts on login
> > while they didn't start doing anything and when they box is working
> > normally and in a clean state because we collect i.e random shutdown
> > issues and are showing them those after next book.
> 
> 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.

Apport 1.26 (since November 2011) made an attempt to ignore crashes
which happen during shutdown (LP #460932), but by nature this is a
rather heuristic and brittle detection. If it still happens too often,
we should definitively make the filter more agressive. This is a
particular class of crashes which are totally not SRU-worthy, and
would normally not have any visual impact at all. Now they just lead
to making session shutdown a lot longer (because it's hanging on the
Apport and core dump I/O), and getting "old crashes" reports at the
next login.

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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