apport permission error

[Brian Murray]

I've recently been investigating a bug[1] where whoopsie-upload-all,
provided by apport, is unable to add extra details to crash reports.
This happens when the crash report has the following attributes:

-rw-r----- 1 bdmurray whoopsie 194K Feb  7 15:22 _usr_bin_seeded-in-ubuntu.1000.crash

It's worth noting whoopsie-upload-all is run as root. I've discovered
that changing /proc/sys/fs/protected_regular from 1 to 0 allows
whoopsie-upload-all to write to the file. I imagine that apport is not
the only application affected by this setting.

What is the practical benefit of having protected_regular set to 1?

[1] http://launchpad.net/bugs/1848064

Thanks!
--
Brian Murray