errors.ubuntu.com: support for Server?

[Robie Basak]

errors.ubuntu.com has been a great success on the desktop[1]. Would
support for sending reports from server installations be useful?

Even though vUDS is already underway, I thought a mailing list
discussion would be more useful than a session to throw ideas around
first. We can always arrange a separate out-of-band discussion on G+ if
it looks like this would be useful.

What would you like to see? Here are some questions and ideas to get us
started.

Who would be willing to submit reports? Production servers? Test
deployments? Experimenters? Any other categories?

Which of these categories of reports will be useful to us? Are there any
that will cause us to misinterpret the results? Is there any need to
categorise the reports at submission time (eg. perhaps ask the reporter
a question)?

What should the UX be? How should we protect privacy and avoid reports
inadvertently being submitted by users who do not wish to submit them?

Should we have different UX defaults between the development and
production releases?

If the system is opt-in (which I assume it will be), will we have enough
users opting in for the system to be useful?

Some implmentation ideas:

Production server operators may want to vet reports before agreeing to
send them, so an interactive CLI like aa-logprof(8) or apport-cli(1)
that allows users to see exactly what they are submitting would be
useful. So essentially a CLI equivalent of the GUI error reporting
dialog.

Or perhaps some kind of remote ssh enhancement to the existing GUI error
reporting dialog, so users get the same UI on a desktop machine that
connects to a server machine, picks up the crash reports there generates
and sends reports via the local GUI?

An update-motd enhancement to notify server operators that crash reports
are pending. This could provide the command to type to enter the
interactive CLI to submit them and a reference to a manpage with more
details on how to turn off local crash report collection.

A bash prompt enhancement present only during development, which prompts
users with a shorter version of the motd prompt. Or would this be too
intrusive? I thought of it because I imagine users not logging in much
to test servers, and so might not see the motd prompt (I rarely see the
motd prompt when I test, since I use ssh shared connections and
short-lived cloud instances).

Other thoughts:

Right now I feel that the information we get from users about Server
quality is poor. As always, some bug reports are awesome, are from
competent submitters, and highlight real problems which we need to fix.
But many bugs filed appear to be automatic and in response to postinst
failures due to local misconfigurations. I think this overrepresents the
set of users who are experimenting and underrepresents the users
who are using Server in production. I'm not sure we get any other real
feedback about quality right now, apart from general inferences that we
can draw from talking to people. So if we think it's worthwhile, I'd
love to see better sources of this information.


So...what should we do, if anything? Please discuss!

[Daviey] Just need to work out, *if* it is worth doing .. *how* to do
it.. and *who* to do it :)


[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPQ7k0jRUE4#t=30m8s
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