reporting some bugs apparently does nothing

[peridot]

Every time I log in (!) apport notifies me of a crash. I click on the crash icon and an apport window opens up offering to let me become root and report a bug (I think in dconf). I do this. After a while, another window appears, allowing me to view what details I would be submitting, and offering me the choice of whether to actually report the bug, and the choice of whether to notify me if the crash reoccurs. I click the appropriate button to submit the bug.

What I expect to happen:
Following https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport#What_does_it_look_like_for_users.3F , I expect a browser window to open showing a page that allows me to confirm whether my bug is a duplicate, and to add any additional information before submitting a bug report.

What happens:
Nothing. The window disappears and no further activity appears to occur. I have no idea whether the bug was successfully submitted, rejected because it was a duplicate, or not submitted because apport was unable to file it. I have no idea whether it's worth notifying me if the crash reoccurs, or whether it's worth my time to click on future crash notifications.

This same misbehaviour occurs when (say) the GIMP crashes while I'm logged in: if I ask apport to submit the bug, nothing visible happens, so I have no idea whether it's a known bug. If I had to guess, I'd say these bugs are probably being automatically flagged as duplicates using the known-duplicates bug matching script, but without any user feedback, I can't really tell what's going on. Even if they're duplicates, pointing me to the bug they're duplicates of might help me find workarounds.

The misbehaviour does *not* occur when I run "apport-bug <packagename>" from a command line, which is what I did for this bug, and which behaves just as described in the documentation.

If it matters, I use Chromium as my browser, but apport-bug from the command line successfully brings up the bug reporting page in a new tab in Chromium. And firefox is installed and works, in case apport is trying to use it to communicate with me.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: apport 2.0.1-0ubuntu8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-23.31-lowlatency 3.2.14
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-23-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Jun 7 05:16:59 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release amd64 (20101007)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: apport
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-04-27 (40 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

I'm also having this bug, on a Lubuntu Precise amd64 system with apport 2.0.1-0ubuntu9 and apport-gtk 2.0.1-0ubuntu9. It started when I upgraded from Oneiric to Precise. In contrast, Apport crash reporting works correctly on another machine that has Ubuntu (not Lubuntu) Precise i386 (installed from scratch).

This also happens when I try to submit a report for a .crash file in /var/crash with ubuntu-bug or apport-cli.

    ek@Apok:/var/crash$ apport-cli _usr_bin_audacious.1000.crash

    *** Send problem report to the developers?

    After the problem report has been sent, please fill out the form in the
    automatically opened web browser.

    What would you like to do? Your options are:
      S: Send report (60.1 MB)
      E: Examine locally
      V: View report
      K: Keep report file for sending later or copying to somewhere else
      I: Cancel and ignore future crashes of this program version
      C: Cancel
    Please choose (S/E/V/K/I/C): s
    ek@Apok:/var/crash$

xdg-open and sensible-browser both work and behave correctly when issued from the command-line. I don't know if the problem is in submitting the crash data or opening the browser, but I strongly suspect that it's in submitting the crash data, because I am never told that crash data is submitted.

This problem is not due to the bugs being reported being identified as duplicates. I have verified this by simulating a segmentation fault in nano by sending it SIGSEGV with kill. The apport service is triggered and collects the data, but I am never told it is being sent or given a web browser tab/window in which to report the bug.

I've tried rebooting and manually stopping and restarting the apport service (though I don't think this is the problem with the service itself, which seems to create .crash files just fine).

I have a number of crash bugs in Lubuntu Precise that would be considerably harder for me to report because of this. I am also considering early-adopting Lubuntu Quantal Alpha 1 on one of my machines, but I am concerned that if I did, my efforts might be considerably less useful to the community if my ability to report crashes is hindered.

If anyone is running Lubuntu Precise or Quantal and does *not* have this problem, I think it would be valuable to post about that here.

[peridot (peridot-faceted)]

I do not think this is a duplicate of #994921. I *can* report bugs manually with ubuntu-bug, crash or no crash. What I think this is, is a documentation bug. Naively, since apport reported the bug, I expected it to behave as documented on the page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport . Instead, it behaves as described in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker . If the documentation were corrected, I think the bug would be mostly fixed. I would still like to see one final notification, after the automated submission process is complete, saying at least "your crash was reported to the Ubuntu automated crash report database". If possible it would be good if this notification gave pointers to the bug page of the relevant package, so that users could see whether anyone else had experienced the same crash; ideally the page would also summarize the auto-crash reports for the package.