provide ability for a hook to mark a bug as private

[James Hunt]

It would be very useful for an apport hook to be able to mark a bug as private by default.

Ideally, I'd like this facility for upstart since if stateful re-exec fails, upstart will attempt to write a dump of the internal state both when running as PID 1 and as a Session Init when managing a desktop session for a non-priv user.

However, we have no way of knowing whether the internal state dump might contain sensitive information (for example, a job may hard-code a password in it).

Currently, the best we can do is simply tag any bugs apport raises to denote that 'the file exists', but ideally, we'd allow it to be uploaded securely since the internal state will provide the best information to help us identify what went wrong.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Just to clarify, we are talking about "normal" bug reports here with apport-bug, not about the automatically created ones on program crash? The latter are already private by default. So is the state dump in some upstart log file which gets attached with apport-bug? If it potentially contains passwords, shouldn't that log file be inaccessible to non-root users, so that apport-bug cannot access it in the first place? Or does your package hook attach it using the hookutils.attach_root_command_outputs() facility?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Done in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~apport-hackers/apport/trunk/revision/2602. This includes documentation how to mark bugs as private in hooks.

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Thanks! Actually, I was talking about crashes; I'm in the process of developing my first hook so hadn't actually created a bug yet and thus didn't realise they were private by default.

However, thanks for providing this feature as I know others have been interested in it.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package apport - 2.9.1-0ubuntu1

---------------
apport (2.9.1-0ubuntu1) raring; urgency=low

  * New upstream release:
    - launchpad.py: Add support for filing bugs as private. Document this in
      doc/crashdb-conf.txt. (LP: #1144647)
    - Fix crash in error() and warning() if there is no sys.stderr.
      (LP: #1012445)
    - Fix Turkish translation to add missing keyboard accelerator.
      (LP: #648750)
    - fileutils.py, find_package_desktopfile(): Restrict to autostart and
      application .desktop files. (LP: #1147528)
    - apt/dpkg get_modified_files(): Fix crash when encountering non-ASCII
      file names in an ASCII locale. (LP: #1044014)
  * Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.4 (no changes necessary).
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:04:35 +0100