errors.ubuntu.com: benefits on Server?

[Robie Basak]

I thought I'd split this thread into two. One question is about what
benefits error reporting on Server might bring, and that's what I'd like
to discuss here.

> [Daviey] Just need to work out, *if* it is worth doing...

Is it worth doing? What sorts of errors will we pick up on right now? Do
these errors happen in the real world? With us diverting effort to this,
are we going to neglect some category of errors that we currently won't
pick up this way?

Some categories of errors come to mind:

1) Segfaults leading to core dumps. I don't see many bug reports of
these at all. We do get the occasional excellent bug report though. My
feeling is that segfaults on server are actually quite rare.

2) Maintainer script failures. We get lots of these reports. Most of
them are due to local misconfiguration or sysadmin error in a way that I
don't think it's possible or reasonable for us to fix. This is because
most use cases of server packages involve sysadmin configuration file
editing. Perhaps this can be fixed at a higher layer (eg. charms being
careful to not introduce these kinds of errors). I think these reports
aren't useful individually for this reason, but may be useful in
aggregate to identify real bugs. So it seems to me that error reporting for
these would be really useful.

3) Perhaps daemon start failures that aren't from maintainer script
failures? This is subject to the same sysadmin misconfiguration problem
above though; I'm not sure how useful this would be.

What other kinds of errors will we initially pick up on? What categories
have I missed, or does anyone disagree with my analysis above?

Is it worth doing this just to be able to analyse maintainer script
failures?

Robie