Re: [Banshee-List] anonymous usage data

[Max Battcher <me worldmaker net>]

On 2/14/2010 12:24, "Andrés G. Aragoneses" wrote:
> And one more idea: collect asserts a-la Mozilla Talkback tool. For
> instance, we normally don't want the application to crash when an
> expectation from a developer wasn't met in some part of the code,
> because it's bad user experience. However, if we don't crash, the user
> won't report the bug straight away. But there's the best of both worlds:
> using an automatic talkback tool, not only for crashes, but with asserts
> that do not cause a crash (this new aspect wouldn't be covered by the
> current capabilities of the MozillaTalkback tool AFAIK).

While its further getting away from the original subject, Mozilla's 
Talkback tool isn't exactly built for Mono. Crash Reporters for Mono end 
up being simpler (thanks to Mono/.NET having easy/direct access to the 
stack trace upon exceptions, for instance). It would be nice, though, 
for Mono-based apps to standardize on a usefully generic crash reporter. 
Certainly if Banshee were to take the lead, I'd imagine many others 
would follow.

Exception Reporter seems like a decent place to start:

http://exceptionreporter.codeplex.com/

On the other hand, its LGPL and it would probably be nice to have one in 
a less restrictive license. Also, for Mono apps you'd want a Gtk# UI.

One other wishlist item for a Mono "standard" crash reporter would be 
support for Ubuntu's apport:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport/DeveloperHowTo

There's even a Blueprint spec pointing out that better/generic Mono 
support for Apport would be nice:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/apport-mono-crashes

(Although, I can't actually remember the last time I saw Banshee crash 
to the desktop, automatic exception reporting still sounds like a good 
idea to me.)

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net