Best practice for reporting bugs

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 02:13:37PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> ke, 2009-03-25 kello 11:58 +0000, Matt Zimmerman kirjoitti:
> > I've noticed that, even among Ubuntu devleopers, not everyone is applying
> > our best practices for reporting bugs.  In particular, reporting bugs
> > directly to Launchpad is usually *NOT* the best approach.  This should only
> > be done if there is no better option.
> > 
> > In almost all cases, it is preferable to report the bug using Apport. 
> 
> I tend to turn off apport, because it pops up every time one of my own
> programs-under-development crashes, and that makes my laptop unusable
> for up to about a minute (more, if I'm running with an encrypted disk).

Apport should probably start using ionice.

I don't think it's meant to trigger on programs which aren't installed in
standard locations, because of just the case you're describing.

In any case, you can invoke it manually using ubuntu-bug when needed.

> > 2. The "Help" menu in many applications includes an entry "Report a
> > problem..." which will invoke Apport manually.
> 
> I didn't know that. Bug again, launching apport from that takes about 30
> seconds before anything visible happens, and after that another 30-40
> secnods before I can actually do something.
> 
> Apport is very useful, but it's horrible to use, at least on my laptop.

For me, it pops up right away with a progress bar.  It does take a long time
before I can file the bug, because it's reading the dpkg database, which
takes forever, in order to find out which package the program belongs to.
You can skip that if you invoke ubuntu-bug with a package name.

-- 
 - mdz