Presenting "Unhandlable error" isn't useful to users or developers

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

When aptdaemon has an exception, the aptdaemon client presents an "unhandlable error" <http://imgur.com/I97mZ> to the user, who probably can't do anything about it. Meanwhile, the error isn't reported to Ubuntu developers, who probably can do something about it.

If an exception results in aptdaemon triggering Apport in Ubuntu 12.04 and later, the "unhandlable error" alert should be retired altogether, as it is now redundant.

If an exception doesn't result in aptdaemon triggering Apport, it should be converted to a RecoverableError that does.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

Am Freitag, den 16.11.2012, 21:51 +0000 schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
> Public bug reported:
>
> When aptdaemon has an exception, the aptdaemon client presents an
> "unhandlable error" <http://imgur.com/I97mZ> to the user, who probably
> can't do anything about it. Meanwhile, the error isn't reported to
> Ubuntu developers, who probably can do something about it.

> If an exception results in aptdaemon triggering Apport in Ubuntu 12.04
> and later, the "unhandlable error" alert should be retired altogether,
> as it is now redundant.

It is the job of the client to decide on how to handle the unhandlable
error. Basically the error message informs the client that the
transaction failed in a way that we haven't yet thought about and that
we cannot name exactly. Software center could just ignore it. But how
should the user be notified that the installation of an app failed?
Letting software center crash doesn't seem to be a good idea. :)

Furthermore aptdaemon should already trigger an apport report in this
case. But you will only get a system service crashed report that isn't
connected with the transaction in an obvious way.

What should we do in such a case? Should we improve the apport report?
E.g. "Installing software failed" and don't show any error in the client
(software-center). It will be quite tricky to get application names into
the apport error message but it could be doable.