| [technology-pmc] discussion - automatic error report in Subversive |
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Greetings, I’m writing on behalf of Subversive project
team and want to discuss one aspect of our project. The matter concerns our
e-mail error reporting feature. One the one hand, this feature is really
important for us and helps us to improve project stability. From another hand,
this feature can potentially violate some Eclipse guidelines. Therefore I want
to hear opinions regarding this feature and let’s think if it’s allowed
to have this feature or probably, how to make this functionality available for
all infrastructure, i.e. make global service for error reporting. The idea behind error reporting feature is simple
– in case of errors people in most cases don’t spend their time to
find information how to report a bug, describe failure case, etc. It means that
developers loose a lot of feedback from community. The only way to improve this
– make the process simple. In case of error we have stack trace, which
can be helpful in most cases. So if we detect that exception have relation to
Subversive then we ask user to enter comments and create error report, which
includes these comments, stack trace and environment information. If user want,
then this error can be sent automatically by e-mail to our mail server (when
project hosted on Polarion.org, we used its mail server). We use this error reporting
during 1.5 years and it’s really invaluable feature, which helped to
improve project, so we want to leave this feature. But now project is official Eclipse
Technology project, so I would like to evaluate following aspects: 1. Does
this feature violate some policies or guidelines? 2. From
my point of view this feature is really helpful for any project, so does it
make sense to have it as standard service? 3. Now
e-mails are sent to special mailing list on Polarion.org dedicated for error reports.
Should we change this to eclipse mailing list? Usually we get near 10 error reports
per day (estimated amount of users is 25.000), and anyone can send e-mails to
that list without subscription, so there are a lot of spam. If we will change mail
list to some from eclipse.org, then all e-mails, including spam will be
archived, which is wrong from my point of view. 4. In
addition to error reporting we contributed our menu items “Send Tip for
Improvement” and “Send Error Report” to the root Help menu. Are
there any policy/guidelines violation? What do you think? Your thoughts are welcome. Best regards, Igor Vinnykov Subversive Project |