Re: Logging user actions

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 20:42 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:

> I meant to say that customers are of course sending in bug reports for
> Nautilus, with crashes that are really hard to reproduce.  And they of
> course never quite know what they did to trigger the crash.
> 
> I've started writing a little logging mechanism for Nautilus, based on
> the ideas in this nice and short paper:
> 	http://visibleworkings.com/trace/Documentation/ring-buffer.pdf
> 
> [The patch is attached]
> 
> The idea is that you log stuff (like user actions) to a ring buffer.
> The user then has a way to dump the log to a file when he notices
> something wrong, or the log can also be dumped automatically when the
> program detects an error.
> 
> So, I have started instrumenting Nautilus with several logging points: 
> 
> - windows are created
> - a window changes location
> - a window changes its view
> - a file gets activated
> - etc.
> 
> The idea is to have better info about how to reproduce bugs.  While
> right now I'm only logging user actions, this is extensible to logging
> internal actions as well.

Sounds interesting. Maybe we could somehow get bug buddy to trigger a
log when nautilus crashes too?

Personally I'm not totally sure logging highlevel operations are helpful
for many bugs, but having more information is never bad.

> And in the medium-term future, I intend to use this logged info to
> analyze how users browse their file systems.  We may be able to extract
> nice usability data out of it.

This requires some sort of auto-sending of logs which has privacy
issues. That doesn't mean its a bad idea though. I really would like
some information like that. Maybe someone could write an app that uses
the a11y framework to gather similar stats for the whole desktop.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a jaded amnesiac stage actor who hangs with the wrong crowd. She's a 
cold-hearted nymphomaniac vampire living on borrowed time. They fight crime!