Respect gsettings org.gnome.desktop.privacy report-technical-problems

[Jeremy Bicha]

gsettings-desktop-schemas 3.16+ includes this boolean key:
org.gnome.desktop.privacy report-technical-problems

This key is used in GNOME's Settings app and Initial Setup tool. It would be great if Ubuntu would be able to integrate with that.

See also
--------
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gsettings-desktop-schemas/tree/schemas/org.gnome.desktop.privacy.gschema.xml.in#n50

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/tree/panels/privacy/cc-privacy-panel.c

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-initial-setup/tree/gnome-initial-setup/pages/privacy/gis-privacy-page.c

Ubuntu Bug 1614818 requests that the GNOME apps support apport but I think this bug may be the more correct way to do it.

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

Here's a basic proof of concept that is sufficient for gnome-initial-setup and gnome-control-center to show the extra bug reporting widget on their Privacy pages.

Install the .conf to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/

chmod +x server.py
sudo ./server.py

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

> Perhaps /etc/default/apport enabled=0/1 could be deprecated in favor of that key.

No, it can't be deprecated (because servers/cloud/Non-GNOME flavors) nor synchronized (because multiple users on one system and privilege boundary). A user gsetting can *not* be used to entirely disable the generation of crash reports in /var/crash. But it is simple and straightforward to query it in apport-gtk to suppress the upload/reporting of crash reports.

The main blocker here is that the report-technical-problems is off by default, which we don't want in Ubuntu -- it should be consistent with the system-wide "on" default, where it asks for every crash whether to upload it.

Another problem is that we already have some setting for this -- in ubuntu-system-settings "security & privacy" there are options for disabling apport error reports. This would then be redundant and preferrably get moved to use the same key?

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

I looked at activity-log-manager briefly (it provides Unity's Privacy Settings panel). It calls out via dbus to the whoopsie-preferences service which reads and writes two keys (report_crashes and report_metrics) to the /etc/whoopsie conf file. If report_crashes is set, it creates (the blank) /var/lib/apport/autoreport. apport uses the existence of that file to decide whether to send reports

I looked around but couldn't find anywhere that actually uses the metrics setting.

GNOME's privacy schema also has a org.gnome.desktop.privacy send-software-usage-stats key with the description "Send statistics when applications are removed or installed." I think the key itself may be fine but I think we'd need to tweak the description.

My impression is that whoopsie-preferences is unnecessary.

It's also difficult for me to understand what apport, update-notifier and whoopsie are all doing. I think the checkbox in activity-log-manager only controls the automated background error message reporting and not the popups telling you something crashed and would you like to report a bug which I think users find a lot more annoying. For instance, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/93457/how-do-i-enable-or-disable-apport

Maybe the correct way currently to disable those popups is the gsettings boolean key com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-apport-crashes

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

You can ignore my August 22 comments about adding a dummy dbus service. I think we'll just patch out the code that requires it instead.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> My impression is that whoopsie-preferences is unnecessary.

but that's the service that u-c-c talks to for enabling/disabling the autoreporting no?

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

Yes, but this bug is about switching things over to use the new desktop.privacy gsettings keys. unity-control-center can work with those keys directly. I think apport, update-notifier and whoopsie should be able to read those keys themselves as needed without needing a separate service running in the middle.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

well, as Martin pointed out the gsettings key are user level configs where the whoopsie/apport tools are system ones so you can't really "migrate" them over, also whoopsie is used on products that probably don't want to get depends on GNOME components (ubuntu touch, server, ...)