How can I track a bug that caused a crash and was reported via apport / whoopsie?
- by nealmcb
It used to be that when a program crashed, especially when a user was using a pre-release of Ubuntu, apport could be used to open a bug report. The user could then track the bug, see if it affected others, help fix it, etc.
As of Precise 12.04, this behavior and workflow changed. As I discovered in Bug #993450 “Apport fails to submit bug report”, by default apport no longer opens a bug report (and it is awkward but not impossible to get it to do so). At the same time people are noticing a new "whoopsie" process, as described at What is the 'whoopsie' process and what does it do?.
After some more googling, I dug this blueprint up, which describes the whole process:
ErrorTracker - Ubuntu Wiki. (It didn't mention whoopsie or daisy, so I added them - please correct me if I got it wrong).
Wow - this sounds like great work to streamline and improve the crash reporting process.
I'm left with this question: how does a user learn what the status of the problem is?
The blueprint now has this requirement
The user should have some way to check back on the status of their crash report; e.g. have some report ID they can look at to see statistics and/or any associated bug #. E.g. provide a serial number at time of filing that they can load via a web page later on.
which seems unimplemented. Is there anything available in the meantime?
And how does a developer get into the game? Going to https://daisy.ubuntu.com just provides an "Incorrect Content-Type" error message.
Finally, I suggest documenting the apport behavior changes in the Release Notes. It should be of interest to anyone who has been trying to help out Ubuntu.
