"Failed with an unknown error" could be more helpful

[hackerb9]

I used Deja Dup for the first time today.

I like that Deja Dup is usable by neophytes and newbies. Unfortunately, when it fails, which it did for me, it leaves a rather sour impression. In particular, I'm referring to Deja Dup's infamous "FAILED WITH AN UNKNOWN ERROR" followed by a wall of debugging information. Please consider that a backtrace (see attached screenshot) can look intimidating to many people and make them think, "Oh, this program is broken in such a serious way it would take a programmer to fix. I'll have to use something else."

I understand that sometimes things happen that we haven't coded for and we need to throw a vague exception to help with debugging. But, given how many "Unknown error" messages show up when I Google, it seems Deja Dup doesn't cover some of the basic, common problems that everyday users can fix on their own.

For example, the screenshot I attached is of an error that doesn't warrant a backtrace: the user had chosen to backup to a directory which was unwritable. I concede that ideally Deja Dup would hold the user's hand to walk them through figuring out *why* the directory is unwritable, but that's not what I'm asking for.

I am requesting that Deja Dup have a policy of never dying with an "Unknown error", unless absolutely unavoidable.

I do not expect this to take a lot of extra work or coding. In my example screenshot, Deja Dup could have solved the problem by instead asking the user to choose a different directory.

Thank you.

[Vej (vej)]

Hello hackerb9.

Thanks for taking the time to formulate this suggestion to improve Déjà Dup. It has been reported before so I will mark this as a duplicate and encourage you to discuss about this in bug #811516 instead.

Best Regards

Vej

[hackerb9 (hackerb9)]

Hi Vej,

That bug is similar, but I don't think it's a duplicate. In the bug from five years ago, the request is to make the Unknown Error less intimidating by doing things like hiding the traceback.

To be clear, this bug is not about the technical implementation of the dialog box. What I was trying to request was a policy change: that the dèjá dup project consider it a high priority problem that end users are too often shown the dreaded Unknown Error.

As a mature project, dèjá dup should not need to fall back to debugging info for common situations (e.g., backup directory not writable). Perhaps a milestone for the next revision could be "review common causes of Unknown Error and add error handling code to avoid it."

Thanks!