Error alert stops appearing for the same crash after a while

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This might be related to bug 973277.

Actually, no it isn't, bug 973277 is just about apt errors. This problem occurs for errors in general.

We need the rate limiting for system processes, especially those which restart themselves automatically. Without this, the user would potentially get infinitely many apport dialogs. In theory we can check whether it is an application which has a .desktop file, but this check is very expensive (it needs to happen at the time of the crash, not at the time when the user says "report this").

So we might need to resort to some heuristics instead (looking at uid, $DISPLAY, etc.). Also, we should keep the property of not updating a crash report if the current one hasn't been shown by the UI yet, as a first line of defense.

For a system process error, agreed, we need show that only once per session: showing it more times wouldn't leave users any wiser.

For statistical purposes, we could aggregate subsequent errors from the same process in the same session, and report them together after the first system process error in any later session. A drawback is that it might result in errors being reported days after they happened, so that statistics for past days would need recalculating.

Bumping this up to medium as the plan for 13.04 is to group system error reports together with the next application error report. So the concerns about showing too many dialogs should now be moot.

We should make sure we're sending a crash count for the number of times this crash appeared since the last dialog for it. Otherwise our counts will be skewed (as they are now to only three crashes per system) to not show multiple instances of the same system crash that occurred before the application crash dialog just shown.

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

This issue has sat incomplete for more than 60 days now. I'm going to close it as invalid. Please feel free re-open if this is still an issue for you. Thank you.