Automated Bug Reports on Blender Crash
Although I find it nice to be able to manually submit bug reports and describe the situation, it's a bit cumbersome. To automate bug reporting, when it crashes, can there be an output file automatically sent to you? It could record the last 10 steps taken in Blender (save out the undo list) and all the file and system specs. There could be a setting in Blender to add your system hardware/software specs for Bug reporting issues. It could be linked to an account here and auto generate a support ticket number.
That way when there's a bug and many people experience it, it can show up in the blender developers admin control panel, and we can see trends.
When a new release which includes the fix is released, the dev team could then send out notices to those with the bug when that bug has been fixed. The notification system could be built into Blender.
11 Comments
I'm against, even if there's a form of user agreement before sending as * @LilacDogoo * mentioned. For two reasons: It's annoying for the user and it will make the Dev's life a nightmare.
No matter whether you want to send a report or not, It's just annoying.
It blocks your work for a few seconds, sometimes slows down everything because the computer actually struggles to display the popup or gathering the information it needs, or whatever it does in the background ...
And most of the time, no you don't want to send a bug report: Lots of crashing bugs are known, or expected because what you are doing is on the edge of Blender's limits (like managing large scenes or hyper dense assets, it might crash a lot, and the user lose enough time already so please don't spend even more of its time).
Additionally, the softwares who use such system usually are those who are big enough to have employees just to do the triaging. Which is the exact opposing of Blender's small dev team, in which case it is the user who is expected to:
If you have any form of automated bug report, you basically remove the user's implication in this process while making the reports frequency extremely larger, and it will result in a ridiculously huge amount of bug reports that the devs will have to clean and most of these reports are just good for the trash bin.
I don't think it's productive to encourage users NOT to make bug reports. It's already a good deal of work on the user's side to make them, and then to respond in even more detail when devs inquire about the bug in the devforum.
The existing bug system is fairly self-sufficient. If a bug is known it's closed fairly quickly and merged into the appropriate task. If it's something at the very limits of Blender's usable constraints, a crash shouldn't be happening anyway: there needs to be a solution that doesn't result in the user losing their session, that's a fundamental aspect of software design. That's expected in certain cases, but no software's default state should be "If you push it too far in this direction, it will shit itself and crash".
I entirely agree that the Blender dev team's size and capability needs to be respected, but all that amounts to is a bug report that goes unanswered for a few weeks. If people expect that will be the case, there's no problem.
Ok, but I have never encouraged users not to make bug reports. What is your point here?
"And most of the time, no you don't want to send a bug report: Lots of crashing bugs are known, or expected because what you are doing is on the edge of Blender's limits (like managing large scenes or hyper dense assets, it might crash a lot, and the user lose enough time already so please don't spend even more of its time). "
This fairly clearly discourages bug reports in some circumstances. It's not even ambiguous, you literally say "No you don't want to send a bug report [with following reasons to explain why]".
Even with these reasons a bug report should still be sent, as I explained above. There is no condition that a user experiencing a bug shouldn't report it: it's not the user's job to check whether a bug has been reported, it is up to dev forum moderators to merge bugs when they're duplicates. The frequency of a bug being reported just highlights its severity and priority to be fixed.
My point is: we're discussing the validity of this proposal, and you made this comment as a counterargument (you literally said "I'm against"). I am pointing out why I don't think the argument you brought up negates the need for automated bug reports, therefore defending the proposal.
An alternative to this would be to ask the user if they want to make a bug report. Upon confirmation save the log file to desktop, and open a browser window with a new bug report and the log already attached. At the very least this would encourage users to make the report since most of the work is already done for them.
That was proposed five months ago 😛
That link points back to this proposal. This IS the proposal from 5 months ago ;)
that link points to the comments of @LilacDogoo and @ManBlender (:
Not a duplicate, and last I checked a comment isn’t a proposal. I’m suggesting a partially auto-filled bug report with the log saved to the desktop and attached to the report.
Of course, not completely automated. That would be a privacy issue.
This operation must require the users consent FIRST, every time, before sending information across the internet. People's idea of what could be considered "sensitive information" may be very different from person to person. Therefor data collection needs to be very transparent to the user.
* @LilacDogoo * after restart of Blender after crash Blender can ask about sent the log, but should exist some otpion for "loged" user to ask something maybe and made notification for user about questions and additional information to solve something.