Apport

For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD.

For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion.

Looking at the PTS entries, I realized that it has been more than 2 yrs, since I pushed the first Apport packages into Debian.

We have talked about it [in the past](http://www.researchut.com/blog/report- bugs-with-apport-3), and do not see a direct need for apport yet. That is one reason why it still resides (and will continue to) in Experimental.

Even though not used as a bug reporting tool, Apport can still be a great tool for (end) users to detect crashes. It can also be used to find further details about program crashes and pointers to look further.

Hello World. This is the follow-up to the last [2](http://blog/report-bugs- with-apport) updates on the state of apport in Debian.

A lot has changed since the last update on Apport. Currently, in Experimental, we have version 2.6.1-2. With this version, and going forward, there will be no hacks to make it work for Debian. Thanks to Martin Pitt, with his assistance, Apport now has a very basic crashdb in place for Debian. The Debian crashdb provides Apport the interface to interact with the Debian BTS.

This is a follow up to the previous post regarding Reporting bugs with Apport

Apport, version 2.2.3-2, has been pushed to experimental. There were some nice feedback that led to some more changes that I will talk here.

**Opt out: **As a developer, if you see the volume of reports to be annoying, you have the option to opt out of apport reports. To do this, you should specify the XBS-Apport: No field in your package ’s control file. When your application crashes, apport first checks for that field in your package’s description and acts based on what you chose.

So yet another bug reporting tool. :-)

When I prepared Apport for Debian, I wasn’t sure how it will look going forward. If you look at the current one lying in experimental, it just detects your crashes and pops up in your systray. It doesn’t have the mechanism to interact with BTS.

So, like the title of this post says, this is the first worthy feature for Apport in the context of Debian.

apport just cleared the new queue and is now available in experimental. For those who do not know what apport is:

Debugging program crashes without any automated tools has been pretty time consuming and hard for both developers and users. Many program crashes remain unreported or unfixed because:

• Many crashes are not easily reproducible.

• End users do not know how to prepare a report that is really useful for developers, like building a package with debug symbols, operating gdb, etc.

• A considerable part of bug triage is spent with collecting relevant information about the crash itself, package versions, hardware architecture, operating system version, etc.

• There is no easy frontend which allow users to submit detailed problem reports.

• Existing solutions like bug-buddy or krash are specific to a particular desktop environment, are nontrivial to adapt to the needs of a distribution developer, do not work for crashes of background servers (like a database or an email server), and do not integrate well with existing debug packages that a distribution might provide.

Apport is a system which

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