Please provide option to continue bug report from different computer

[Tom Reynolds]

There are some situations where it is desirable to gather debugging information on a system affected by a bug, but to login (to Launchpad/Ubuntu SSO) and complete editing this bug report from a different system.

This is already implemented for situations where the affected system runs headless, i.e. servers without a graphical display. However, this should also be a user choice exposed as a command line option to ubuntu-bug (which, at least according to --help it currently is not).

A common use case where this would be nice to have is testing software in a VM, but not wanting to expose Ubuntu SSO credentials to this VM (e.g. for security concerns). Another use case is a need to report a serious bug in the default web browser where this web browser is unable to access any websites.

There is a workaround:
  DISPLAY= ubuntu-bug somepackage
Unfortunately this means the debugging data collection phase will provide a text-only UI instead of the nicer / more user-friendly GTK one.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: apport 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.0.0-15.16~18.04.1-generic 5.0.6
Uname: Linux 5.0.0-15-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.6
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sun Jun 2 01:24:07 2019
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: apport
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
mtime.conffile..etc.apport.crashdb.conf: 2019-01-17T11:47:59.939850

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Chris Guiver (guiverc)]

I've added myself to this bug report.

I do some QA-testing of Ubuntu (flavors) using various old boxes, some of which have useless/tiny keyboards, plus there are rare occasions where the gui becomes unreadable (the reason for the bug-report)

I've learnt to work around it for the most part (eg. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lxqt-panel/+bug/1809205/comments/0) but it'd be nice to not have to.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

ubuntu-bug can take a file name as an argument so if you have created a bug report on another system you can use 'ubuntu-bug samba.apport' as the argument and you'll be able to report that bug on Launchpad. The only strange thing here is that the file name must end in .apport which isn't made terribly clear in the documentation for the --save switch.

[Tom Reynolds (tomreyn)]

Thanks for explaning that it is possible to create a bug report on one system, then manually copy it to another computer where the bug report can then be submitted using ubuntu-bug.

This is not exactly as convenient as being able to run apport on one system to gather debugging info, submit this to Launchpad (but not create the bug, yet), then access the URL printed from another computer which then allows for SSO authentication and bug submission from this other computer. So a bit of a different use case, too.

But, yes, it is mostly nice-to-have - (not having reviewed the code) it just seems like it should be easy to implement since this is what ubuntu-bug already does when it is unable to create its GUI.