Martin Pitt » Apport

Apport crash processing now enabled for Maverick

pitti — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:46:06 +0000

The Debian import freeze is settled, the first rush of major changes went into Maverick, and the dust now has settled a bit. Thus it’s time to turn back some attention to crashes and quality in general.

This morning I created maverick chroots for the Apport retracers, and they are currently processing the backlog. I also uploaded a new Apport package which now enables crash reporting by default again.

Happy segfaulting!

ubuntu-bug audio

pitti — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:58:15 +0000

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.

So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.

Easier offline bug reporting with Apport

pitti — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 12:16:57 +0000

The days before Chistmas are a wonderfully quiet time to catch up on old work which otherwise just drowns in the daily noise. I got a lot of Apport cleanups and improvements done.

One particular highlight of 1.11 is that it is now easy and consistent to collect information for a bug report on one place/at one time and save it into a file

$ apport-bug --save /tmp/argh.apport udev

… and report that later on with

$ apport-bug /tmp/argh.apport

This can happen on an entirely different machine.

Interrogation with Apport hooks / Qt developer needed

pitti — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 14:04:01 +0000

So far, Apport package hooks were limited to collecting data from the local system. However, a lot of debugging recipes and standard bug triage ping pong involves asking the reporter further questions which need reponses from a human. This can range from a very simple information message box “Now, please plug in the camera which is not detected” until a complex decision tree based on the symptoms the user sees.

As discussed at UDS Barcelona, Apport will grow this functionality in Karmic. A first preview is available in my PPA. The GUI looks horrible, but the API for hooks won’t change any more, so you can now begin to develop your interactive hooks.

Example:

import apport.hookutils

def add_info(report, ui):
    apport.hookutils.attach_alsa(report)

    ui.information('Now playing test sound...')

    report['AplayOut'] = apport.hookutils.command_output(['aplay',
            '/usr/share/sounds/question.wav'])

    response = ui.yesno('Did you hear the sound?')
    if response == None: # user cancelled
        raise StopIteration
    report['SoundAudible'] = str(response)

Please see the package-hooks.txt documentation for details.

I implemented all currently existing UI functions (information, yes/no question, file selector, multiple choice dialog) for GTK and CLI, and all except the multiple choice dialog for Qt. Anyone willing to hack on an implementation of ui_question_choice() similar to what the GTK frontend is doing?

Update:I merged Richard Johnson’s branch (thanks!) and uploaded a new package into my PPA. apport-qt is now fully functional.

Easier testing for Apport bug patterns

pitti — Thu, 28 May 2009 07:55:08 +0000

This morning I added a test script to the Apport bug patterns.

This finally allows you to reliably test a new bug pattern before you actually
commit/push it. You can invoke it with either a .crash file, or a Launchpad bug
number:

$ ./test-local 122988 Matched bug pattern: https://launchpad.net/bugs/122637 $ ./test-local /var/crash/_bin_bash.1000.crash No match