Apportexpanded

Revision 3 as of 2007-04-15 16:28:25

Clear message

Summary

Add privacy, resumability and ftp features (with an ETA & upload speeds) to apport. This will allow apport to be used more effectively. One can bank on apport to report all crashes without the user being interfered or being paranoid.

Rationale

  • As of right now, one is never sure if apport has uploaded the bug or not. Also there are concerns regarding security, for e.g. if firefox crashed or some application which has properties such as names,passwords, (in case of firefox or other browsers) websites gone (profiling) etc. This needs to be communicated to the user. In essence apport has to be intuitive.

Use Cases

  • Bob application crashed. He has no idea how much time it would require for the uploading of crash to complete. Hence decisions (if his work is interrupted or finishe) such as shutting down the machine, or going to hibernate or keep the machine running for the upload to finish for some time are unknown.

  • Peter application crashes. He thinks apport would report it. During the upload for some reason or the other, network connection lost, power cut-out etc, he is unable to upload the crash file. The crash file remains in /var/crash & is not useful for anybody.

  • Jason is working in a bank/clinic/finance instituion. He was making an e-commerce transaction through some application (for e.g. firefox) and the application crashed. He is in 2 minds whether to send the crash or not.

  • shirish tries to upload a crash file. After waiting for about an hr. He gets a message saying HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error. [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/99989]

Scope

Any user using apport (Ubuntu Feisty) & above perhaps.

Design

A specification should be built with the following considerations:

  • The person implementing it may not be the person writing it. It should be clear enough for someone to be able to read it and have a clear path towards implementing it. If it doesn't, it needs more detail.
  • That the use cases covered in the specification should be practical situations, not contrived issues.
  • Limitations and issues discovered during the creation of a specification should be clearly pointed out so that they can be dealt with explicitly.
  • If you don't know enough to be able to competently write a spec, you should either get help or research the problem further. Avoid spending time making up a solution: base yourself on your peers' opinions and prior work.

Specific issues related to particular sections are described further below.

Summary

The summary should not attempt to say why the spec is being defined, just what is being specified.

Rationale

This should be the description of why this spec is being defined.

Scope and Use Cases

While not always required, but in many cases they bring much better clarity to the scope and scale of the specification than could be obtained by talking in abstract terms.

Implementation Plan

This section is usually broken down into subsections, such as the packages being affected, data and system migration where necessary, user interface requirements and pictures (photographs of drawings on paper work well).

Implementation

To implement a specification, the assignee should observe the use cases carefully, and follow the design specified. He should make note of places in which he has strayed from the design section, adding rationale describing why this happened. This is important so that next iterations of this specification (and new specifications that touch upon this subject) can use the specification as a reference.

The implementation is very dependent on the type of feature to be implemented. Refer to the team leader for further suggestions and guidance on this topic.

Outstanding Issues

The specification process requires experienced people to drive it. More documentation on the process should be produced.

The drafting of a specification requires English skills and a very good understanding of the problem. It must also describe things to an extent that someone else could implement. This is a difficult set of conditions to ensure throughout all the specifications added.

There is a lot of difficulty in gardening obsolete, unwanted and abandoned specifications in the Wiki.

BoF agenda and discussion

We'll have a first public session on this on the first Monday in UBZ.

CategorySpec