Apport does not get used for crashing KDE programs

[Michael]

Binary package hint: apport

When a KDE application crashes in Ubuntu, the KDE crash manager is called and not Apport. I have seen this several times today (when Kontakt crashed) using the KDE 3.5.7 packages from the Kubuntu KDE 3.5.7 repository, but I am pretty sure that it was the same for KDE 3.5.6.

[Freddy Martinez (freddymartinez9)]

Happens to me here. what are the future plans of Kubuntu and intergrating with apport? Anyways, confirmed on Kubuntu Feisty.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This is a deliberate decision from the Kubuntu guys at the moment. If they want to use apport for crash handling, they just need to disable the KDE crash handler.

[Michael (michaeljt)]

Seems a bit silly, since the KDE crash manager doesn't seem to send anyone any useful information in the current set up. But since they maintain the stuff, it is obviously their decision.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

We're using apport in Intrepid.

[Nicolás Alvarez (nicolas-alvarez)]

How do I manually disable the KDE crash manager and use apport? (Hardy)

[Michael (michaeljt)]

I have upgraded to (Kubuntu) Intrepid, and have seen a number of application crashes in the few hours I have been using it but no Apport yet. Do I need to enable this somehow?

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

It should be enabled by default. You could try running update-notifier-kde in case it is not running for some reason.

[Michael (michaeljt)]

My system is fully updated and update-notifier-kde is running. Is there anything I can check "manually"?

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

Check /etc/default/apport for enabled=1.
It gets disabled for releases.

If it's enabled, is there anything from the crashes in /var/crash?

[Michael (michaeljt)]

It was indeed disabled. But somehow I can't quite consider this fixed if that is the default. And I think that with KDE4, automatic crash reports will be much needed :)

[Daniel Hahler (blueyed)]

Michael, while Apport crash reports may be very detailed, they get ignored quite often though.
Additionally, enabling it on a released version would probably cause a lot of bug reports and as you may know the bugsquad and developers have more than enough to work on already.
The apport retracing service is capable of duplicating bugs, but still it would cause a lot of additional bug reports.
Additionally, not every user wants to create a Launchpad account anyway and the apport service may use a lot of memory/system resources during recording of a crash.

Since it's quite easy to enable, if you want to, I think the current behavior is currently the best practice. This has been discussed somewhere else already (on the devel-discuss or devel mailinglist IIRC).

Anyway, this bug was never about enabling apport by default. There's bug 174195 about this.

[Nicolás Alvarez (nicolas-alvarez)]

I'm a developer. I enabled apport manually. On many of the crashes I get (which aren't that many because KDE3 and apport don't like each other), I click cancel, because at the time I can't be bothered to write a description of what I was doing before it crashed.

Unless there is a way to get the stackdump to get uploaded without needing a launchpad account or any other kind of user input (= like Microsoft's error reporting), apport shouldn't be enabled by default.

[Michael (michaeljt)]

Daniel, acknowledged. Thanks for taking the time to explain this.