apport silently sends crash reports to errors.ubuntu.com

[John Pye]

For quite some time now, I have experienced apport popup windows reporting certain crashes. When I click to submit a report, the popup window disappears and nothing further happens.

In the past, when closing the popup window, I used to see a new Launchpad bug report where I could enter further details about what was happening, or check that the bug had already been reported by others.

However that feature seems to have been disabled or become broken some time ago.

If apport is going to silently ignore my request to report my bug, or is reporting it somehow without feedback me, then either of these is poor design, since there has been no feedback to me as the user about what is happening.

Can I suggest that apport be changed to inform the user of whether or not the crash report will be uploaded, and whether or not the user will be redirected to give extra details? Then, if the firefox window fails to popup, I can report a separate bug about that if needed.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Crash reports from apport are only sent to Launchpad, where you would have a browser window opened to add more details, if you are running the development release of Ubuntu (currently Artful Aardvark). Otherwise, crash reports are silently sent to errors.ubuntu.com. If I recall correctly, the design decision was to make apport as unintrusive as possible hence there is not a second dialog displayed saying "Yes, it was sent". That being said perhaps the dialog about sending the crash could be modified to notify you that no further action is required.

[John Pye (jdpipe)]

That would be great. For years now I have been assuming it was broken, since there is no acknowledgement of any form. Consequently I have been pressing 'cancel' instead of submitting the report. Why not wait until the report has been sent before closing the dialog, for example, and giving an error if it isn't sent?

Additionally, sometimes I would have liked to described what I was doing at the time of the crash -- sometimes there's some context that seems like it would be useful. It would be great to have that option offered.