Turn crash generation off by default for phone on stable channel

I think it is not whoopsie that needs to be disabled but apport which is responsible of generating the crash file and is the source of the load on the device when a crash occurs. If the crash file is not uploaded then there is no need to generate it at all on a retail phone.

also the foundation team had some very strong opinions about turning off bug reporting by default, please involve them in the discussion.

jibel is correct and it is actually apport that would need to be disabled as it creates the crash files and creates the load on the device.

Yes, I didn't understand what the request was for in the other bug - could have been about privacy concerns or something else.

can we configure /etc/default/apport to set enable=1 only if system-image-cli reports the channel is proposed

 bug #1498133 should be addressed prior to disabling apport

The /etc/default/apport file should use the same setup as hostanme and timezone - being a link to /etc/writable
It can be removed from writeable_paths

see http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/livecd-rootfs/trunk/view/head:/live-build/ubuntu-touch/hooks/03-etc-writable.chroot

Adding a settings task since the user option to send in reports needs to control this

Added a unity8 task, the wizard will need to be updated. Currently there is a page in the wizard informing the user that their device is configured to automatically send crash reports. This will need to be updated to only be shown for devices that are configured to do so by default. There is a dbus service provided by whoopsie-preferences that provides this information.

interface = com.ubuntu.WhoopsiePreferences
property = AutomaticallyReportCrashes

Seems a little extreme to disable all crash reporting. Why not disable it for Unity8, that seems to be the one that everyone is worried about. We have no other way to judge quality in the field, so it would be a real shame to loose the only feedback we have on real use-cases.

Uhg, "lose"

Maybe the errors that testers experience are representative of the errors that customers experience. But even if that's true now, it won't necessarily be true all the time. There might be common errors that disproportionately/only affect customers using a language, time zone, keyboard, carrier, scope, or local app that our testers seldom use. Or errors that occur with the update process itself for a particular stable update. With error reporting turned off for stable, you won't know when this happens.

So, maybe a follow-up to this change could be to alter apport on stable to record just error statistics, not crash files. Then you wouldn't get a slowdown from dumping each crash, but you'd still be able to see when stable had an error rate higher than development channels for a particular package. When that happened, you could selectively turn on full error reporting for just that package to see what was going on.

Reverting to "committed" given that the image is not released yet

I was curious about how this changed the quantity of crash reports we receive from the stable channel. The following output shows the number of crashes per day from ubuntu-touch/stable/ubuntu armhf systems.

20151001: 53
20151002: 42
20151003: 38
20151004: 74
20151005: 38
20151006: 50
20151007: 50
20151008: 47
20151009: 51
20151010: 40
20151011: 51
20151012: 43
20151013: 53
20151014: 57
20151015: 57
20151016: 40
20151017: 37
20151018: 29
20151019: 35
20151020: 12
20151021: 14
20151022: 9
20151023: 13
20151024: 11
20151025: 5
20151026: 14
20151027: 18
20151028: 7
20151029: 18
20151030: 14
20151031: 14

That is a significant drop due to this change. The same query for crashes from ubuntu-touch/devel/ubuntu returns very few crashes.

20151002: 1
20151005: 1
20151006: 1
20151007: 1
20151008: 1
20151009: 1
20151014: 1
20151019: 1
20151115: 3

I think its really important we address the reason behind the UI freezes.

jibel suggested I check ubuntu-touch/rc-proposed/ubuntu:

20151001: 77
20151002: 89
20151003: 17
20151004: 16
20151005: 52
20151006: 56
20151007: 62
20151008: 43
20151009: 17
20151010: 7
20151011: 4
20151012: 19
20151013: 14
20151014: 39
20151015: 88
20151016: 71
20151017: 22
20151018: 11
20151019: 72
20151020: 54
20151021: 68
20151022: 47
20151023: 57
20151024: 7
20151025: 8
20151026: 90
20151027: 77
20151028: 72
20151029: 99
20151030: 73
20151031: 30

ubuntu-touch/rc-proposed/bq-aquaris.en:

20151001: 36
20151002: 45
20151003: 12
20151004: 17
20151005: 39
20151006: 20
20151007: 27
20151008: 9
20151009: 16
20151010: 4
20151011: 4
20151012: 8
20151013: 18
20151014: 26
20151015: 42
20151016: 56
20151017: 8
20151018: 13
20151019: 50
20151020: 35
20151021: 44
20151022: 45
20151023: 37
20151024: 14
20151025: 8
20151026: 78
20151027: 79
20151028: 88
20151029: 96
20151030: 73
20151031: 20

And meizu-en:

20151001: 68
20151002: 46
20151003: 19
20151004: 24
20151005: 47
20151006: 19
20151007: 13
20151008: 16
20151009: 24
20151010: 5
20151011: 4
20151012: 9
20151013: 16
20151014: 37
20151015: 50
20151016: 90
20151017: 22
20151018: 27
20151019: 25
20151020: 49
20151021: 76
20151022: 46
20151023: 38
20151024: 30
20151025: 16
20151026: 81
20151027: 58
20151028: 47
20151029: 36
20151030: 33
20151031: 19