Tails

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2015-11-09 06:31:58

So, the upgrader points to ~/.xsession-errors on failure, because it currently has no means to display debugging info in its own GUI. And thus it prints debugging info on stdout/stderr, and that info lands into:

• on Wheezy: ~/.xsession-errors which is user readable
• on Jessie: into the systemd Journal (in Jessie) which can only be read by root, but is included in WhisperBack reports.

I’ve looked at the places where we point to .xsession-errors, and every time, either we can instruct the user to try something themselves, and then we do it (and generally we point to a dedicated doc page); or nobody but developers will be able to do much about the error anyway, so best would be to report a bug (and the report will include the debugging info by default) => IMO we should suggest to report a bug instead of pointing to ~/.xsession-errors. Still we need to be careful because some of these errors happen after we’ve disabled the network; in those cases a technical enough user would benefit from looking in the Journal instead of manually reporting a bug without the debugging info (since they can’t use WhisperBack offline); let’s assume that those people will quickly learn how to use journalctl if they didn’t yet.

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2015-11-09 06:37:18

Actually the smallest possible change is to instruct to use sudo tails-debugging-info instead of ~/.xsession-errors. This works even without an admin password because WhisperBack needs it, at least until we run WhisperBack as a dedicated user.