[Bug 1825021] Re: apt's dpkgpm.cc WriteApportReport function should gather more data

[Brian Murray]

In the event that this were SRU'ed for it to be useful we'd need to SRU
apt to the release from which people were upgrading.

** Tags added: disco rls-ee-incoming

** Changed in: apt (Ubuntu)
   Importance: Undecided => High

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Title:
  apt's dpkgpm.cc WriteApportReport function should gather more data

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  While fixing bug 1813464 it occurred to me that it is not obvious that
  the dist-upgrader tarball includes its own copy of invoke-rc.d and
  that this has been complicated to debug more than once. The apport
  information in that report was gathered by apt's dpkgpm.cc code and I
  think we should extend that to gather additional information from the
  environment at the time that the package installation failed. For
  example the dist-upgrader sets the following:

          os.environ["PATH"] = "%s:%s" % (os.getcwd()+"/imported",
                                          os.environ["PATH"])

  Gathering path from the environment would have made diagnosing bug
  1813464 a lot easier. I tested modifying dpkgpm.cc with the following:

     if(const char* env_p = std::getenv("PATH"))
        fprintf(report, "EnvPATH: %s\n", env_p);

  I then installed the crash-in-postinst package from the daisy-plucker-
  seeds PPA and received a crash report with the EnvPATH key and value.
  Its worth noting that when apport gathers environment information only
  a white listed set of keys is gathered to prevent disclosing
  potentially sensitive information. So we should look at what
  environment variables the dist-upgrader sets and gather those at a
  minimum.

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