"Failed with an unknown error" could be more helpful
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Déjà Dup |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
deja-dup (Ubuntu) |
New
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
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.
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