Re: [Fwd: Apport]
On Friday 02 May 2008 05:54:55 pm Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
Passing this along for consideration.
iirc, Will Woods was working on making this usable with Fedora a while back...
-------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: James Westby <jw+debian(a)jameswestby.net>
> To: distributions(a)lists.freedesktop.org
> Subject: Apport
> Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 21:58:23 +0100
>
> Hi all,
>
> I just wanted to let you all know about a little package that we
> use in Ubuntu that may benefit other distributions. This package
> is called "apport".
>
> Apport is an automatic bug reporting tool. It does a number of things,
> the main one of which is to pop up on crashes of system programs.
> To do this it installs a kernel core pattern in
> /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern that pipes core files to it (available
> since the .23 kernel I believe). This writes out a .crash file to
> /var/crash. The user is then notified with a notification icon and
> libnotify message that something has crashed. Clicking on the icon
> tells them what and offers to report a bug.
>
> For Ubuntu this opens a new bug in launchpad with all the information,
> and then opens the page in the users web browser for them to provide
> more details.
>
> It also hooks in to python failures somehow to provide the same service,
> and also has intergration with update-manager so that you can report a
> bug if a package installation/upgrade fails.
>
> Some people may be disturbed by the thought of the flood of bugs that
> would be generated. You're right, it does generate a lot of
> bug reports, but there are a few things that make it worthwhile.
>
> Firstly, it's only active for development releases, as it's easiest
> to fix the bugs then, and those users will generally be more equipped
> to provide the necessary information.
>
> Secondly, and this is what makes apport so great, it can detect
> duplicates by itself. It takes the core file, enters a chroot,
> and using some magic it "retraces" the bug report, using full symbol
> table information.
>
> This means that it can detect duplicates on it's own and mark them as
> such, and also that without the users having to have debugging symbols
> in their executable, or know what gdb is, provide full backtraces.
>
> In addition to this a package can provide an apport script that gathers
> information from a user's system before reporting the bugs. For instance
> Firefox can report all of the extensions that the user has installed.
>
> It is obviously currently quite specific to Ubuntu, however it is surely
> possible to make it work on other systems as well, and I'm sure Martin
> would be happy to merge patches that did that. You can find more details
> about the project at
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport
>
> and the code at
>
> https://launchpad.net/apport
>
> I think other distributions would do well to look at it, and even if you
> don't want to use it in your distribution there may be ideas that you
> want to take.
>
> Does anyone else already have a system like this? Are there any aspects
> that are covered by other tools used in your distro? Can anyone see
> anything that would make it even better?
--
Jarod Wilson
jwilson(a)redhat.com