Apport crash detection/reporting

Apport intercepts Program crashes, collects debugging information about the crash and the operating system environment, and sends it to bug trackers in a standardized form. It also offers the user to report a bug about a package, with again collecting as much information about it as possible.

It currently supports

• Crashes from standard signals (SIGSEGV, SIGILL, etc.) through the kernel coredump handler (in piping mode)
• Unhandled Python exceptions
• GTK, KDE, and command line user interfaces
• Packages can ship hooks for collecting specific data (such as /var/log/Xorg.0.log for X.org, or modified gconf settings for GNOME programs)
• apt/dpkg and rpm backend (in production use in Ubuntu and OpenSUSE)
• Reprocessing a core dump and debug symbols for post-mortem (and preferably server-side) generation of fully symbolic stack traces (apport-retrace)
• Reporting bugs to Launchpad (more backends can be easily added)

Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport for more details and further links. The files in doc/ document particular details such as package hooks, crash database configuration, or the internal data format.

Platform requirements

The absolute minimum requirements for your distribution are Python 3.10 or above. Depending on which features you want enabled, various Python packages also need to be available.

TODO: document the Python dependencies

Temporarily enabling apport

The automatic crash interception component of apport is disabled by default in stable releases for a number of reasons. To enable it just for the current session, do

sudo service apport start force_start=1

Then you can simply trigger the crash again, and Apport's dialog will show up with instructions to report a bug with traces. Apport will be automatically disabled on next start.

If you are triaging bugs, this is the best way to get traces from bug reporters that didn't use Apport in the first place.

To enable it permanently, do:

sudo nano /etc/default/apport

and change enabled from 0 to 1.

Crash notification on servers

You can add

if [ -x /usr/bin/apport-cli ]; then
    if groups | grep -qw admin && /usr/share/apport/apport-checkreports -s; then
        cat <<-EOF
You have new problem reports waiting in /var/crash.
To take a look at them, run "sudo apport-cli".

EOF
    elif /usr/share/apport/apport-checkreports; then
        cat <<-EOF
You have new problem reports waiting in /var/crash.
To take a look at them, run "apport-cli".

EOF
    fi
fi

to your ~/.bashrc to get automatic notification of problem reports.

Contributing

Please visit Apport's Launchpad homepage for links to the source code revision control, the bug tracker, translations, downloads, etc.:

https://launchpad.net/apport

The preferred mode of operation for Linux distribution packagers is to create their own branch from main and add the distro specific packaging and patches to it. Please send patches which are applicable to main as merge requests or bug reports, so that

1. other distributions can benefit from them as well, and
2. you reduce the code delta to upstream.

Creating releases

Update the translation template before the release:

./setup.py build_i18n --merge-po
git commit -sm "chore: Update translation template" po/

This project uses semantic versioning. To create a release, increase the version in apport/ui.py and document the noteworthy changes in NEWS.md. Then commit the changes and get them reviewed:

version=$(python3 -c "import apport.ui; print(apport.ui.__version__)")
git commit -sm "Release apport $version" NEWS.md apport/ui.py

Once merged to main, tag the release and generate a xz-compressed release tarball:

version=$(python3 -c "import apport.ui; print(apport.ui.__version__)")
name="apport-$version"
git tag "$version" main
git archive --prefix="$name/" "$version" | xz -c9 > "../$name.tar.xz"
gpg --output "../$name.tar.xz.asc" --armor --detach-sign "../$name.tar.xz"

On https://launchpad.net/apport/main create a release from the milestone. Set the date and copy the entries from NEWS.md to the release notes. Click on "Add download file" and add apport-${version}.tar.xz. Use the filename as description and do not forget to add the GPG signature. Finally set the bug status for all linked bugs from "Fix Committed" to "Fix Released".

Afterwards create a new milestone on https://launchpad.net/apport/main using the next version as name. All other fields can be left empty.