Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Evan Dandrea]

Sorry Martin, I posted with the wrong address initially.

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 7:41 AM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> Matthew Paul Thomas [2012-08-07 10:47 +0100]:
> > But optimizing purely for the number of error prompts is the wrong
> > goal.
>
> I don't think that this is being done here. I would just like to
> suppress dialogs which are irrelevant for the user, and which are
> unlikely to ever get fixed in a stable release anyway (cf. crashes
> during logout, the rather large subset of daemon/python thread crashes
> which do not affect the UI, etc.). Because those won't ever go away,
> are a nuisance for the user, and don't help anyone.


How can you programmatically tell that a daemon crashing has not affected
the UI?

I disagree that they do not help anyone. I imagine the Ubuntu One team
wants to know about every time the syncdaemon fails. Equally, lets say we
have a program doing regular backups of the filesystem. The program
crashes. Okay, fine, it autorespawns. It crashes again. It never reaches
the point where it backs up all the user's data. We never know this because
we've decided that applications which recover through autorespawnning are
not worth our time.


> > We then have a choice between explaining what went wrong, or leaving
> > it a mystery.
>
> In many cases the popup itself _is_ the mystery, though :-(
>

Every other mainstream operating system has found a way to communicate to
the user what just happened to their application.

OS X does this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyzyx/6899505621/

Windows does this:
http://elhombre.members.winisp.net/vista_watson01.png

There are a large subset of applications on iOS doing this:
http://www.hockeyapp.net/feature-overview
http://airbrake.io/pages/home
http://www.bugsense.com/

Android does this:
http://android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/google-feedback-for-android.html

This is a proven design pattern. If the dialog text is confusing, lets
focus on improving that.


> I'm not arguing against showing the popup for applications which just
> crashed in the user's session. Those are fine, and as I said in
> LP#1033471 I think it's totally fine to turn off rate-limiting for
> this case.


Excellent.
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