apport ERROR: hook /usr/share/apport/package-hooks//chromium-browser.py crashed

d'oh! do you even have a chromium profile?

===
 user_dir = userdir if userdir is not None else get_user_profile_dir(report)

def get_user_profile_dir(report):
    dir = HOME + "/.config/chromium/Default"
    return dir
===

I don't understand your question. It's not that I can't use chromium, the error message happens when I try to report a bug about chromium.

But for the record, I logged in as another user, deleted my ~/.config/chromium folder, started up chromium once, closed it, then did "ubuntu-bug chromium-browser" ---> same error.

sorry but i still don't understand.
do you mean that you both started chromium and ubuntu-bug as the same user and it failed?

if so, please check that $HOME is what you expect it to be and that $HOME/.config/chromium/Default really exists (and is readable by that user)

I can easily prevent the hooks from failing on this but i don't understand how you end up in this situation. The hooks have been there for a long time and noone else complained about this.

Yes, no problems with my chromium profile. As I said, I logged in as a different user (to make sure it was not only a problem with my user profile), deleted the chromium profile (to rule out any corruption), started up chromium, closed it again, checked if a new chromium profile was created (including the default directory).

Then I opened a terminal, typed in "ubuntu-bug chromium-browser", and then got this error message.

The problem looks a bit like #660579

It's natty, their have been lot's of chromium and apport updates, so can't it be some kind of regression?

bug 660579 (should be a link now)

bug 660579 was different (a missing section in the prefs file), i fixed it.
Yours means the python hooks are unable to even locate your profile.

Could you please try this in a shell:

python /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py

(it should help see if the bug is in the hooks or deeper in apport).
if it fails:

echo $HOME
cd $HOME/.config/chromium/Default
ls -l Preferences

and if that works (maybe python can't figure out your HOME):

python

then..

>>> import os
>>> HOME = os.getenv("HOME")
>>> HOME

it should match the $HOME from above.

user@computer:~$ python /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py", line 269, in <module>
    print '[%s]\n%s\n' % (key, report[key])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd7 in position 300: ordinal not in range(128)
user@computer:~$ echo $HOME
/home/user
user@computer:~$ cd $HOME/.config/chromium/Default
user@computer:~/.config/chromium/Default$ ls -l Preferences
-rw------- 1 user user 6945 2011-04-13 22:58 Preferences
user@computer:~/.config/chromium/Default$ python
Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53)
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> HOME = os.getenv("HOME")
>>> HOME
'/home/user'

Above I replaced my name with "user" and my computername with "computer" for privacy reasons.

ok, that UnicodeDecodeError is unrelated, and should not happen within apport or when redirecting the script stdout to a file.
Could you please try that?

I'm really inclined to think the error is elsewhere...

user@computer:~$ python /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py > 1.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py", line 269, in <module>
    print '[%s]\n%s\n' % (key, report[key])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd7 in position 300: ordinal not in range(128)
user@computer:~$ cat 1.txt
user@computer:~$

No stdout output at all !

user@computer:~$ python /usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py 2> 2.txt
user@computer:~$ cat 2.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/apport/package-hooks/chromium-browser.py", line 269, in <module>
    print '[%s]\n%s\n' % (key, report[key])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/codecs.py", line 351, in write
    data, consumed = self.encode(object, self.errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd7 in position 300: ordinal not in range(128)

oh, i see what it's about now.
when run from within apport, the hooks receive user_dir which is an apport.ui.HookUI instance.
I'll fix that.

This bug was fixed in the package chromium-browser - 10.0.648.205~r81283-0ubuntu1

---------------
chromium-browser (10.0.648.205~r81283-0ubuntu1) natty; urgency=high

  * New upstream minor release from the Stable Channel (LP: #762275)
    This release fixes the following security issues:
    - [75629] Critical, CVE-2011-1301: Use-after-free in the GPU process.
      Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Inferno).
    - [78524] Critical, CVE-2011-1302: Heap overflow in the GPU process. Credit
      to Christoph Diehl.
  * Make the default mail client and browser settings work with the
    x-scheme-handler method of registering URI handlers in gnome3.
    This is based on the xdg-utils 1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu3 fix by Chris Coulson
    <email address hidden>, itself based on Bastien Nocera <email address hidden>
    upstream fix (LP: #670128)
    - add debian/patches/xdg-utils_gnome3_lp670128_for_natty.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
  * Fix the apport hooks to pass the expected 'ui' to add_info(), needed when
    called from apport/ubuntu-bug (LP: #759635)
    - update debian/apport/chromium-browser.py
  * Report a dedicated WMClass per webapp, needed by Unity/bamf.
    (backported from trunk) (LP: #692462)
    - add debian/patches/webapps-wm-class-lp692462.patch
    - update debian/patches/series
 -- Fabien Tassin <email address hidden> Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:36:16 +0200