useless diagnostics in dpkg.log from journalctl due to ellipses

[Seth Arnold]

Many of the apport hooks try to include some information about why a service didn't start correctly. One recent report included the following:

May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux systemd[1]: Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell serv....
May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux sshd[2500]: /etc/ssh/sshd_config line 64: miss....
May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux systemd[1]: ssh.service: Main process exited, ...a
May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux systemd[1]: Failed to start OpenBSD Secure She....
May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux systemd[1]: ssh.service: Unit entered failed s....
May 26 18:39:19 ux305ua-linux systemd[1]: ssh.service: Failed with result 'e....
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

The actual error information is this:

/etc/ssh/sshd_config line 64: miss....
and
Failed with result 'e....

This is very nearly useless.

We should include the -l parameter as suggested so that we stand a chance of seeing an error that doesn't occur in the first twenty characters of program output.

Thanks

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The manual for journalctl for artful indicates that the default should be the full line.

       --no-full, --full, -l
           Ellipsize fields when they do not fit in available columns. The default is to show full fields, allowing them to wrap or be truncated by the pager, if one is used.

           The old options -l/--full are not useful anymore, except to undo --no-full.

Do you happen to know from which release the crash report you saw had ellipsized lines?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Looking at manpages for previous releases of Ubuntu they all contain the same information about --full for journalctl. I did find lines being ellipsized in a DpkgTerminalLog.txt file. Is that what you were looking at? An example:

Instalowanie nowej wersji pliku konfiguracyjnego /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/libvirt-qemu ...
Setting up libvirt-daemon dnsmasq configuration.
● dnsmasq.service - dnsmasq - A lightweight DHCP and caching DNS server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/dnsmasq.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2017-03-07 13:07:21 CET; 44ms ago
  Process: 1289 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/dnsmasq systemd-exec (code=exited, status=2)
  Process: 1272 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/dnsmasq --test (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
      CPU: 25ms

mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 systemd[1]: Starting dnsmasq - A lightweight DHCP and caching DNS server...
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 dnsmasq[1272]: dnsmasq: syntax check OK.
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 dnsmasq[1289]: dnsmasq: failed to create listening socket for 127.0.0.1: Address al… in use
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 systemd[1]: dnsmasq.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=2
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 systemd[1]: Failed to start dnsmasq - A lightweight DHCP and caching DNS server.
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 systemd[1]: dnsmasq.service: Unit entered failed state.
mar 07 13:07:21 Leoo-G5 systemd[1]: dnsmasq.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Ah bug 1713435 looks like the situation you've reported. DpkgTerminalLog.txt contains the ellipsized lines but JournalErrors.txt does not.

[Seth Arnold (seth-arnold)]

Thanks Brian; should we retarget this bug to dpkg to get it to show different output? or is it still apport that is collecting ellipsized logs?

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The file /var/log/dpkg.log contains the ellipsized lines so yeah I think dpkg is better place for this.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

Fixed in https://salsa.debian.org/debian/init-system-helpers/commit/5836b307724f8731b47d3d4d064ada1833182705 thus the package is fixed in version debian/1.49 and later.