For those who care about apport-retrace

[Martin Pitt]

Hi fellow Ubuntu developers,

with today's apport upload, the apport-retrace has been moved to a new
package 'apport-retrace', together with a new tool apport-chroot.

This was done for two reasons:

- To avoid more expensive dependencies of the apport package, so that
  a standard desktop installation does not need to carry packages that
  are only useful for apport-retrace (an operation that most users
  will not care about). In fact, two dependencies of apport could be
  dropped now.

- To be able to install apport-retrace into a chroot under fakechroot.
  This is not possible with the apport package itself, since its
  maintainer scripts fiddle with /proc, which needs root privileges.

At the same time, apport-retrace was made a bit easier: the options -d
(for downloading debug packages) and -C (set ddeb cache directory) have
been removed without replacement. Instead, apport-retrace now uses the
standard apt system (through python-apt) to install missing packages
and their ddebs directly into the system. This has often been
requested by developers anyway (having the .ddebs installed
permanently instead of temporarily, for faster operation) and also
does the right thing for usage in fakechroots. If you call
apport-retrace as normal user and it cannot install packages, it will
instead print out a list of packages/versions and go on (but this will
usually yield a result between 'suboptimal' and 'totally useless').

Work is underway to set up a fully automatic retracing service in the
data center. In fact, the retracing bits are already done, if you have
ssh access to ronne, you can now do

 $ ~pitti/bin/retrace-i386 12345 > 12345.out
 $ ~pitti/bin/retrace-amd64 23456 > 23456.out

(where the numbers are Launchpad bug numbers). This recreates the
crash situation in a fakechroot, calls apport-retrace in it, and
prints the retraced stack traces to stdout (which is why it should be
redirected to a file, which can then be attached to the bug report).

My next step will be to develop some Malone interaction magic to
automatically scan for unretraced crash bugs and attach retraced stack
traces to them, to eliminate the requirement of manual interaction and
data center machine access. I'll also set up a system for ppc soon.

Enjoy,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org
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