ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[Evan Dandrea <evan.dandrea@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hello everybody,
>
> Sergio just brought up the question what our plans are in terms of
> ubuntu-bug, bugs, crashes(?) of click apps.
>
> Did anyone think about anything like this already?
>
> AFAIK we allowed app developers previously to specify in an apport.conf
> where bug reports would go. Is this what we'd want to do through some
> SDK defaults as well? What about crashes?

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for raising this! It's going to be a fun and interesting area,
one where we can really make a compelling experience for third-party
application developers.

Bug reports for crashes didn't scale to tens of millions of users of
Ubuntu as a desktop OS. I don't think it's going to scale to the
potential hundreds of millions of users of Ubuntu the mobile OS. We're
also dealing with an audience that is going to find creating a
Launchpad account daunting at best. So I'm hesitant to suggest that we
start creating Launchpad bugs when a click packaged application
crashes.

We already have crash reporting on the Touch images to
https://errors.ubuntu.com for system applications and we have plans to
extend this to third-party applications on Touch (it should just work,
apport just needs to learn about the click format/API).

This will also extend to developer-specific reports
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#app-requested). These occur when
the application has handled an exception, but the developer has
indicated that they would still like a report of what happened.

Both of these types of reports are entirely noninteractive, with the
decision to send the reports controlled in the Diagnostics section of
the System Settings application
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#Privacy_settings and
http://ubuntuone.com/38wwqUoPOG1KIY6MLWTYYh).

Developers can log into https://errors.ubuntu.com and look up a list
of the problems being experienced in their application, sorted by
frequency. If they want to drill down and get the stacktrace, the
versions of the application that the problem occurred in, or a time
sorted list of all the instances of that problem, it's all there. :)
If they want a Launchpad bug to track their progress on resolving the
issue, there's a link to create one
(http://ubuntuone.com/3UaBadTOm06yyjJ9l39oHz).

Thanks, and do let me know if you have any follow up questions.