Because I like the idea of a package, i.e. program, called from the computer the bug occurs on and automating the process of gathering relevant information I was, while using Debian, very fond of the package called reportbug in Debian. As far as I know there are three ways to report bugs found or acknowledged while using Ubuntu:
- For Debian sourced packages Ubuntu has reportbug, too
- Then there is Launchpad, a web-based reporting system that Ubuntu employ
- For GNOME software there is a package called bug-buddy
- Update: I just stumbled upon apport, Ubunuts’ own automated bug reports. I haven’t figured out yet, how to utilize it if not invoked automatically.
Even though I (so far) can not find a way to utilize apport manually for automatically launched crash reports it’s what I would expact from such a tool:
- inform the user about the issue
- gather relevant information
- let the user know about what’s to be send
- look for similar bugs in the bug tracker
- let the user participate in the bug process, eg. subscribe to the bug
Only thing now is to find out how use it if it wasn’t launched automatically…
Update: Digging a little I can warmly recommend apport which should process crashes dumped to /var/crash automatically initiated from update-notifier. For some reason this just didn’t happen for me.
References:
- Reporting Bugs, Ubuntu Community Help
- Ubuntu Community Help: reportbug package
- Debian bug reporting
- Launchpad
- Apport – Automatic crash reports
- Further reading: Crash reporting in general from Ubuntus’ point of view
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Paul said,
Tuesday, 18th Dec 2007 at 07:39
You can run apport-cli from the terminal to `manually’ report a crash if the update-notifier gui doesnt automatically launch:
$ apport-cli
I spent ages trying to make apport launch after a crash before stumbling across this one. I discovered that the command line utility will search /var/crash and then prompt you for input before launching the browser on launchpad. A satisfactory workaround in my view.