apport-bug options not mentioned in manpage synopsis

[Benjamin Drung]

The man page of apport-bug does not mention in the synopsis that apport-bug takes options. You will not be informed about additional options until you reach the options section.

The options section says: "Please see the apport-cli(1) manpage for possible options."
Can you add that apport-bug takes the same parameters than apport-cli, they work the same, and the only different is that apport-bug has a GUI and apport-cli is for the command line (if this is correct)?

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: apport 2.6.1-0ubuntu6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-17.28-generic 3.5.5
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu6
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Oct 26 23:49:11 2012
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-04-24 (184 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Beta amd64 (20120421)
MarkForUpload: True
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: apport
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-22 (3 days ago)

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for reporting.

I agree that this should be clarified somehow. The same issue is still present in apport 2.17.2-0ubuntu1.1 on Ubuntu 15.04.

Note that I also found bug 1395307 which is strongly related (possibly a duplicate), and also bug 1009927 which might make sense to look at at the same time.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

> Can you add that apport-bug takes the same parameters than apport-cli

This is absolutely not true/intended. Please see "apport-bug --help" for the (much reduced) intended options. They indeed should be added to the manpage.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Guntbert Reiter (guntbert)]

Nothing has changed up to Ubuntu 19.10 - the man pages seem to have not been touched since 2009.
I confirm that there is a very inconspicuous mention of `man apport-cli(1)` though.

[Guntbert Reiter (guntbert)]

continuing ...

Looking at apport-bug --help shows that there is a severe discrepancy between what man apport-cli shows and what apport-bug will accept.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

I see. Thank you very much for the update Guntbert.

[Akbarkhon Variskhanov (kbar)]

The thing is `apport-bug` is just a wrapper script. It doesn't process any of its arguments and just passes over all positional parameters to one of `apport-cli`, `apport-gtk` and `apport-kde`. The reason `apport-bug --help` shows a minimal subset of options is that in this mode only a handful of them are supported, or at least are meaningful. If invoked as `apport-bug`, `apport-cli` by default starts in File bug report mode, so mentioning it is redundant.

I think both the man page and the help message are fine as they are.