The need for apport hooks (was: Re: SRUs for typo fixes in descriptions)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 09:34:33AM -0500, C de-Avillez wrote:
> 3. Apport is disabled on stable releases -- which pretty much means
> no hooks are driven.

Only for automatic crash collection.  'ubuntu-bug <package>' still
works, and for some packages like xorg and others it's the recommended
way of reporting bugs in the stable release.

> 5. When an user complains about a bug/crash on stable, we suggest to
> enable apport, repeat, and report.
> 
> <side comment> I think we are doing it wrong: we should collect
> crashes on all supported releases. </side comment>

I agree.  As designed, apport files a new bug report for each crash,
which can quickly lead to excessive numbers of dupe bug reports (there
are ways of making apport auto-dupe, but this takes effort to set up and
isn't always 100% reliable).  This can quickly become unmanageable
especially for packages that lack someone to keep an eye on the bug
reports.

In any case, these types of reports post-release are most useful in
aggregate rather than as individual bug reports.  If they were filed in
some ultra simple crash database (with no signup required of the user)
we could get most of the value without incurring a lot of extra bug
labor.

Bryce