Missing crash reports for long-running processes

[Bryce Harrington]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 09:04:57AM -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 08:37 +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > Of course, this particular bug report would have been suppressed anyway, because the
> > package was out of date,
> 
> If we're fixing issues with Apport, I think that's a bigger one.  I run
> Karmic, but I don't update everyday.  Probably once a week or two.  And
> basically if I get an Apport dialog I just close it as I know that my
> backtrace will probably get rejected as something inevitably changed.
> 
> I do realized the impact of this and the amount of datacenter space it'd
> take to keep all the binaries.  But it's a source of frustration for me
> as it seems that Apport is only for people who update daily.

I'm in the same situation as Ted.  On my test machines I tend to update
them quite regularly, but I also make myself run Karmic on my main
desktop but I just don't update it as often.  I love *getting* apport
crashes for X bugs since they're quite easy to work on now, however I've
found it quite irritating to *send* apport crash reports, and getting
them rejected due to "Stuff's too old".  Hrmph.

I often wonder why apport can't pre-determine that a given crash is
un-file-able and then either tell me straight off or not bother showing
the crash indicator.

In my dream world, apport would look up the crash on launchpad, match it
as a dupe of an already closed bug, and then say something like, "Sorry
for the crash, but it appears to have been fixed in foobar-1.2.3.  Since
you're on foobar-1.2.0, upgrading might fix it for you.  Would you like
to upgrade to foobar-1.2.3 now?  (Y/n)"

Bryce