Ubuntu
apport package

Do not report upgrade failures against upgrade-system

Bug #404727 reported by Martin-Éric Racine
10
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
apport (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Martin Pitt

Bug Description

Binary package hint: apport

More of a question for LP's Answers section than anything else...

How can we prevent Apport (or more precisely, ubuntu-bug) from filing a bug against a package that is not installed?

Case in point:

People often report a bug against the package 'upgrade-system' when they really mean to file a bug against the package 'update-manager' or to report a generic failure during a distribution upgrade e.g. one package's maintainer script failed while upgrading, etc. This seems to be due to people using the search keyword "upgrade" to find what pseudo-package name they should use whenever reporting a distribution upgrade failure and filing their report against the first package name that matches, which tends to be 'upgrade-system', because it sounds like a plausible pseudo-package name to file a generic distribution upgrade failure.

The goal would thus be to prevent people from incorrectly filing a bug against 'upgrade-system' if that package is not installed. Of course, it would also help if Launchpad indeed provided a generic pseudo-package name to report generic distribution upgrade failures, which Apport could suggest using for that purpose via the desktop's System menu. :)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: apport 1.0-0ubuntu5.2
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: apport
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-13-generic i686

Revision history for this message
Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

We could generally disallow filing bugs against noninstalled packages, but that would make other bug reports much more inconvenient (like reporting typos in package descriptions, reporting that the package doesn't install, etc.), especially after we disable the +filebug page for Ubuntu and make ubuntu-bug the primary bug filing interface.

What we can do, however, is to add this special case to /usr/share/apport/general-hooks/ubuntu.py. It could just redirect bugs against upgrade-system to update-manager if upgrade-system is not installed, or just error out with an information that "this is not the package you are looking for".

How bad is the problem actually? How many false bug reports do you usually get against upgrade-system?

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → Triaged
Revision history for this message
Marco Rodrigues (gothicx) wrote :

I agree that we can't disable bug reports against not installed packages.

We can't just redirect them to update-manager, because If some bug appears in upgrade-system package ? It will be redirected to update-manager automatically, and that's wrong.

Revision history for this message
Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk) wrote :

It would not be entirely wrong, considering that all bugs reported 1) really aren't upgrade-system but rather update-manager issues and 2) the very few exceptions to this concern APT behavior (upgrade-system is just a wrapper that calls APT and deborphan with specific options).

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

> How bad is the problem actually? How many false bug reports do you usually get against upgrade-system?

Martin-Eric, do you have some data on this?

Revision history for this message
Martin-Éric Racine (q-funk) wrote :

I haven't kept exact statistics but, on average, I'd say about 20 to 50 false positives, every time Ubuntu produces a new release. All have been reassigned to the actual package whose upgrade failed or, in the case of a more general complaint about the upgrade process, to update-manager.

Revision history for this message
Martin Pitt (pitti) wrote :

Committed to bzr. Trying to report a bug against upgrade-system now results in

  "You do not have the upgrade-system package installed. Please report package upgrade failures against the package that failed to install, or against upgrade-manager."

if it isn't installed.

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
assignee: nobody → Martin Pitt (pitti)
status: Triaged → Fix Committed
summary: - ubuntu-bug: how to prevent it from filing a bug against a package that
- is not installed?
+ Do not report upgrade failures against upgrade-system
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package apport - 1.9-0ubuntu5

---------------
apport (1.9-0ubuntu5) karmic; urgency=low

  * Merge bug fixes from trunk:
    - hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Do not attach empty Pccardctl*.
    - apport/ui.py: Show a better message when failed connection to crash
      database. Thanks to Marco Rodrigues! (LP: #178507)
    - Do not throw away stderr from gdb.
    - data/general-hooks/parse_segv.py: Handle arithmetic wrapping correctly.
    - backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: More robust of missing ExecutablePath
      due to outdated packages.
    - setup.py: Fix DistUtilsExtra version check. (LP: #428337)
  * data/general-hooks/ubuntu.py: Add distribution channel descriptor, as per
    https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/OemTrackingId .
  * data/general-hooks/ubuntu.py: Do not allow users to file bugs against
    upgrade-system if the package isn't actually installed. Way too many
    upgrade failures get wrongly reported against this. (LP: #404727)
  * debian/rules: Entirely drop obsolete dh_installinit call.

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:31:26 +0200

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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