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.

Temporarily enabling apport
===========================

The automatic crash interception component of apport is disabled by default in
stable releases for a number of reasons [1].  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".

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport#How%20to%20enable%20apport

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 'trunk' and add the distro specific packaging and patches
to it. Please send patches which are applicable to trunk 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.

