Monday 12 May 2014

errors.ubuntu.com and upgrade crashes

Hi,

while chasing around bug 1219245 as it showed up so high in errors.ubuntu.com I
found that:
- that bug exists since at least LibreOffice 4.0.2 (released with Ubuntu 13.04)
- all of todays reports come from 14.04 exclusively
- the bug wasnt ranked high in errors before 14.04 release

I vaguely remember seeing that bug peaking up on errors right after 13.10 was
released, just to quickly vanish into irrelevance again (I might be wrong
there, as I cant go back in time on errors.u.c).

While there is no good reproduction scenario in the bug reports, there is one
report claiming it crahed "while installing a font" and another it crashed
"during an upgrade". This leaves me with the suspicion, that the crash is
actually people leaving LibreOffice running during a release upgrade (which is
brave and a nice vote of confidence, but not really a supported scenario).

By extension, this leaves me with the suspicion that the nice exponential
drop-off of crash reports for a distro over time is not actually us fixing
stuff via SRUs (which is way to slow for that), but that it is just fewer
people doing upgrades vs. people running it in production and experiencing
some transitional crashes (that do not happen after they use the system 'in
production' afterwards).

Does errors.ubuntu.com have a way to identify crashers during a release upgrade
(or maybe even: first-starts after a release update)? Would it be possible to
filter crash reports for that scenario, e.g. trivially: mark crashers 48hours
after the upgrade as 'potentially an upgrade sideeffect' or somesuch?

While those upgrade issues should be a concern too, as-is it seems to me they
are overblown in their importance and we dont have a good way to look if they
happen in regular production use after upgrade.

Best,

Bjoern

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