Accepted apt 0.7.2ubuntu1 (source)

[Michael Vogt]

On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 03:08:31PM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 09:30:22AM -0000, Michael Vogt wrote:
> >  apt (0.7.2ubuntu1) gutsy; urgency=low
> >  .
> >    * apt-pkg/deb/dpkgpm.cc:
> >      - apport integration added, this means that a apport
> >        report is written on dpkg failures
> 
> Glad to see this landing.  What will the user experience be in the desktop
> for this type of failure?  I haven't managed to trigger it yet, but I assume
> that Synaptic fails as usual, and the user is notified later of the details
> through a notification.  If that's the case, can we do better than that, and
> inform the user immediately of the opportunity to report the bug?

Currently the user sees a notification because for apport this is a
root crash. It could be changed so that apport-{gtk,kde} is called
immediately. This would give instant feedback for the crash. The user
will still see the regular error message/terminal from
synaptic. Alternatively it could be intergrated into the synaptic
window with a "report bug" button. 
 
> In the case of Synaptic, shouldn't we also have access to the terminal
> output to attach that to the bug report, something which we can't do yet
> >from libapt?

Not currently, this is one of the things I would prefer to implement
inside libapt as something like a "dpkg-log" feature. It would be
useful in a lot of situations as usually the maintainer scripts spit
out a lot of useful diagnose messages before dying. Something like
"script" inside dpkgpm.cc is what I have in mind.

For the automatic upgrade tester I run the maintainer script again
with "sh -x" (or in case of perl with PERLDB_OPTS="AutoTrace NonStop")
to get a good error log. But on a production system is not really a
option :)

Cheers,
 Michael