[Fwd: Apport]

[Jarod Wilson]

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 at jameswestby.net>
> > To: distributions at 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 at redhat.com