CrashReporting

Revision 3 as of 2006-08-01 10:22:23

Clear message

Summary

Rationale

We want to improve the reliability of Ubuntu software, by making it easy for people to report details about crashes. See also [:UbuntuDownUnder/BOFs/AutomatedCrashReporting:AutomatedCrashReporting], BugReportingTool.

Use cases

  • Willy was creating a logo for his soccer club in Inkscape when it crashed. Being the family's Ubuntu expert, he feels a responsibility to help improve the system. He's reported one or two bugs in Malone before, though it wasn't a particularly enjoyable experience.
  • Aunt Tillie was adding to her genealogical records in Gramps when it crashed. She doesn't know anything about reporting bugs, and has no desire ever to report any.
  • Millie was logging in to her bank account when Firefox crashed. She's used to clicking the "Send" button for Windows Error Reporting, but it would be a bad idea for her to report this problem since anyone could find her banking password in the crash informaation.
  • Thunderbird has just crashed on Billie's machine for the third time in three minutes. She angrily blats away the error reporting alert within 0.8 seconds of it opening.

Design

The crash reporting interface is an interruption; it is not at all related to the user's goal (designing a logo, recording genealogy, online banking, etc). To make things worse, the crash itself has probably just eaten some of the victim's work. They will likely be angry with computers in general, and Ubuntu in particular. Therefore the crash reporting interface must be very simple and apologetic.

Another design problem is that most people who have come from Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.0 or later, will be used to crash reports that are confidential to Microsoft, Apple, or trusted ISVs. For Edgy, Ubuntu crash reports will not be like this: if someone reports a bug and attaches their crash report, anyone will be able to see it. Bug reports can be marked private after the fact, but the crash reporting interface itself must take some responsibility for discouraging leaking of sensitive information.

Mozilla.org can [http://www.mozilla.org/quality/qfa.html say that] "Sensitive data, such as passwords, Web sites visited, and e-mail addresses will not be collected". Why can't we guarantee the same?

Comparisons

Edgy

For Edgy, it will not possible to report a bug without using Launchpad's Web interface. So we should (a) apologize for the error, (b) make it easy to report a bug, and (c) make it easy to reopen the program in question.

attachment:edgy.jpg attachment:edgy-no-reopen.jpg

If a human-readable name can be found for the program (from a .desktop file), the first sentence of the alert should be "Sorry, Name of Program closed unexpectedly." Otherwise, it should be "Sorry, the program “binary-name” closed unexpectedly."

The "If you weren’t doing anything confidential..." satisfies Millie's use case.

Which buttons are present should depend on the program that has crashed.

  • If the crashed program is not now running, the "Leave Closed" and "Reopen" buttons should be present. If the program is running (for example, the automatically-restarted gnome-panel or nautilus, or a manually-restarted program), these should be replaced by an "OK" button.

  • The "Report a Bug…" button should be present only if the crashed executable belongs to a package in Main or Universe. Is this possible?

The keyboard equivalent for the "Reopen" or "OK" button should be Enter, not a letter.

Clicking "Report a Bug…" should open both a Web browser to Ubuntu's Bugs page in Launchpad; and also a floating window near the top left corner of the screen, containing the bug information.

attachment:edgy-report.jpg

In the floating window, the icon should be draggable into the browser's filepicker to select that file, and the pathname should also be copyable text. The "What does the file contain?" expander should disclose a read-only text field containing the crash log as wrapped text.

Edgy+1

For Edgy+1, we assume there will be some sort of database (like [http://talkback-public.mozilla.org/search/start.jsp Mozilla Talkback] or [https://sodium.ubuntu.com/~jamesh/oops.cgi Launchpad Oops]) that can record crash reports, for aggregation and bug reporting by Canonical staff. Crash victims should no longer have to fill out bug reports manually, because it's complicated, and because [http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/maintain/WERHelp.mspx 80 percent of crashes come from 20 percent of the bugs].

This simplifies the initial crash alert a little ...

attachment:funky.jpg

... And it simplifies the resulting reporting interface a lot.

attachment:funky-report.jpg

The window should now be a normal window, not a floating window or a dialog.

Implementation

Code

Unresolved issues

CategorySpec