I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how best to handle unrecoverable errors in the shipped version of an app.
Ideally there’d be an interactive dialog that gave the user the opportunity to submit a log file via email or other means, but it could take a fair amount of work to get the infrastructure for this in place (which I’d like to avoid if possible), and it might require including additional libraries (which I’m also trying to avoid).
Another option is writing log files to a folder (prepended with ‘.’ so as to be hidden on OSs that support it) in the user’s home directory, then showing a dialog informing the user what happened.
There seems to be plenty of precedent for this approach, but searching the forums here suggests that people might not like apps writing to their home directories. Also, casual users may not know how to (or have any inclination to) access the log files, rendering them of limited use. Lastly, it seems the alert dialog should tell the user where the log file was written, but I’m guessing some users might find a dialog that displays the path to their home directory, which might include their name or other personal info, to be somewhat invasive.
I’d like whatever approach I take to be acceptable for a commercial product, but other than that I’m looking for the simplest solution possible, more or less. What are other people doing? Any suggestions on what method to use?