keeping user data keeps files in /var/crash which makes little sense

[Brian Murray]

I am using Dual Boot and choose to Uninstall Ubuntu but keep user data. I then installed a different version of Ubuntu but discovered that my old crash files were still in /var/crash/.

root@ubuntu-phablet:~# ls -lh /var/crash/
total 9.4M
-rw-r----- 1 root pulse 11K May 13 08:48 _lib_systemd_systemd-logind.0.crash
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root pulse 0 May 13 08:48 _lib_systemd_systemd-logind.0.upload
-rw------- 1 rtkit pulse 0 May 13 12:42 _lib_systemd_systemd-logind.0.uploaded
-rw-r--r-- 1 phablet pulse 122K May 12 17:13 _usr_bin_unity8.32011.crash
-rw-r----- 1 phablet pulse 8.9M May 13 08:49 _usr_bin_webbrowser-app.32011.crash
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root pulse 0 May 13 08:49 _usr_bin_webbrowser-app.32011.upload
-rw------- 1 rtkit pulse 0 May 13 14:02 _usr_bin_webbrowser-app.32011.uploaded
-rw-r----- 1 root pulse 313K May 12 14:24 _usr_bin_whoopsie-preferences.0.crash
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root pulse 0 May 12 14:24 _usr_bin_whoopsie-preferences.0.upload
-rw------- 1 rtkit pulse 0 May 13 12:43 _usr_bin_whoopsie-preferences.0.uploaded

This doesn't really make sense as if apport hasn't collected additional information for the crash report, then when it does collect information it will either fail or collect information about the new system and not the one on which the crash occurred.

[Ondrej Kubik (ondrak)]

While I agree with this bug, I believe this is not specific for Dualboot setup. Same would happen with phablet-device-flash too.

User data is wiped by "format data" in the command file ubuntu_command, which is then parsed by the upgrader script, which does actual cleanup. Upgrader script idoes not make difference between full install and updates. So if we choose to clean /var/crash this would have to be added as supported action to ubuntu_command. This would make sense though.

It should be proposed to Ubuntu Engineering for consideration.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for the additional information, the release upgrader for Ubuntu (ubuntu-release-upgrader) removes all files in /var/crash so I'll take this up with Ubuntu Engineering.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

a) due to bug 1235436 we never see files being uploaded at all on the normal images
b) ubuntu-device-flash always cleans up the whole system when doing a fresh install , not cleaning up is definitely dualboot specific here
c) a normal OTS upgrade should definitely clean these files and for this i agree it should happen in both installation setups via the system-image-upgrader script from recovery ... opening an android task for that bit

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

err s/OTS/OTA/
(we do our upgrades over the air, not over the street indeed :) )

[Ondrej Kubik (ondrak)]

Oli where do we delete /data/system-data with ubuntu-device-flash?
Are we actually calling "adb shell rm -rf /data/system-data" from ubuntu-device-flash?
I just checked latest bootable/recovery/system-image-upgrader and we do not delete system-data unless you format /data partition. And in that case dualboot will also delete system-data (var) when we format user data.