I like the talkback feature and have used it in the past. However, I
perfer using it in the debug version since it gives you feedback about
asserts as well as crashes. I've found as many rare failures in asserts
as crashes using the talkback technique -- and Python errors are often
ignored instead of causing crashes like C++ programs. So I'd vote for
making the debug version available for customers as an optional install
and providing talkback for all errors.
John
Heikki Toivonen wrote:
Maybe you meant this message to go to dev? You sent to me only, which is
why I am replying in private. Feel free to forward/reply to dev.
My personal bias is to avoid the bug by having good testing rather than
writing code to report bugs to users, expecially because there are so
many possible bugs.
I'd rather leave this in the debug version and have some of our "power"
customers using the debug version.
My point is that we can never find all the bugs in testing. Like you
said, "there are so many possible bugs". For example, suppose a bug
shows up in 1 instance of every 1,000 Chandler installation. We'd be
extremely lucky to have enough "power" customers to uncover that. On the
other hand, if we had 10,000 or more users, the likelihood that someone
will run into it is getting significant and if we make it easy to report
it is a pretty good chance we can act on it.
Also, silently ignoring exceptions is potentially really, really bad.
(It is likely a program written in some compiled language would have
even crashed. And even in our case some users will run into bugs where
they crash the whole application.) We should give the user some kind of
indication that a problem we didn't anticipate cropped up and give them
a chance to do something about it, rather than hiding it under the covers.
And suppose we did hide the problem. It is likely that at some point in
the future the users start experiencing weird, very noticeable problems.
But if they report those problems to us, we will have a very difficult
time finding out what is causing them. If we fix those symptoms, the
original bug could still go unfixed.
Mozilla has had huge improvements in stability from the Talkback crash
reporting tool. I can remember many cases where the developers were
unable to reproduce a bug, but thousands of people were experiencing it.
The only way the bugs were found and verified to be fixed was by using
Talkback. It is an optional install, and it is optional to send the
crash reports.
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