> if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records or crash dumps and you will never figure out why it crashed
On Fedora you can use ABRT (AKA Problem Reporting) to view logs and tracebacks of a component that has crashed, and report the problem via Bugzilla. Also, GNOME isn't a system component, Fedora would still work without it, but it would use a TTY terminal instead.
I've never seen A/B testing used for crash reporting. Perhaps it could be used for this, but it's flabbergasting to me that you see it as only for crash reporting.
> Apport will notify you about the crash and offer to file it. Do that.
I wouldn't call it auto-reporting when the user has to agree first; consent is the sticking point. (Same for abrt) (granted, I should have been more precise and I suppose that is automated in a sense; I took "automatic" to mean "without asking")
Fedora's Automated Bug Reporting Tool (abrt) uses this to automatically produce crash reports, which you can sanitize and approve to post in a central location for developers. I imagine that Ubuntu does something similar.
AFAIK for example on Fedora this (ABRT) is opt in and only sends "thing crashed" if you opt in. You need to explicitly manually check and confirm a full crash dump before sending it, so really not anything being done without the user knowing, at least on Fedora.
Using kdump, it can also report kernel panics. Kdump acts as
a kernel that is executed after the main kernel panics. The fresh kernel has a clean state and can store the dump in a file system.
the QR code functionality is worse in all cases except where your storage system is completely inaccessible/irreparably damaged
It's worse because it's not an automatic process. It's also better, because it doesn't require external dependencies like abrt and kdump -- it's part of the kernel.
Thanks though I don't know why none of the threads in the crash report have any stack traces. Unfortunately this doesn't look actionable. I'll have to ask someone to take another look.
We do not upload any information from crash reports unless you upload the report yourself. We only collect anonymous usage data, which you can opt out of.
It looks like this could have been discovered by simply having (anonymised) crash report telemetry? I don't know about others, but that sort of telemetry doesn't sound so bad.
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