Do not report upgrade failures against upgrade-system
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
apport (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Low
|
Martin Pitt |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: apport
More of a question for LP's Answers section than anything else...
How can we prevent Apport (or more precisely, ubuntu-bug) from filing a bug against a package that is not installed?
Case in point:
People often report a bug against the package 'upgrade-system' when they really mean to file a bug against the package 'update-manager' or to report a generic failure during a distribution upgrade e.g. one package's maintainer script failed while upgrading, etc. This seems to be due to people using the search keyword "upgrade" to find what pseudo-package name they should use whenever reporting a distribution upgrade failure and filing their report against the first package name that matches, which tends to be 'upgrade-system', because it sounds like a plausible pseudo-package name to file a generic distribution upgrade failure.
The goal would thus be to prevent people from incorrectly filing a bug against 'upgrade-system' if that package is not installed. Of course, it would also help if Launchpad indeed provided a generic pseudo-package name to report generic distribution upgrade failures, which Apport could suggest using for that purpose via the desktop's System menu. :)
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: apport 1.0-0ubuntu5.2
PackageArchitec
ProcEnviron:
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=fi_FI.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: apport
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-13-generic i686
We could generally disallow filing bugs against noninstalled packages, but that would make other bug reports much more inconvenient (like reporting typos in package descriptions, reporting that the package doesn't install, etc.), especially after we disable the +filebug page for Ubuntu and make ubuntu-bug the primary bug filing interface.
What we can do, however, is to add this special case to /usr/share/ apport/ general- hooks/ubuntu. py. It could just redirect bugs against upgrade-system to update-manager if upgrade-system is not installed, or just error out with an information that "this is not the package you are looking for".
How bad is the problem actually? How many false bug reports do you usually get against upgrade-system?