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!
Feb 8
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.
Jan 20
I finally listened to Sebastien Bacher and applied for GNOME commit rights yesterday, after hassling Seb once more about committing an approved patch for me. Surprisingly, it only took some 4 hours until my application was approved and my account created, wow! Apparently 71 patches are enough. 
With my new powers, I fixed a crash in gdm, and applied two stragglers into gvfs’ build system today.
More to come!
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.
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
Mrz 31
Yes! I just broke the “200 bugs” mark on the “bugs fixed in Jaunty” list.
/me goes to fix more…