Comment 26 for bug 122688

BTW, the effect of filing useless bugs is mitigated with

apport (0.86) gutsy; urgency=low

  * test-apport: Check that apport does not create reports for emtpy core
    dumps.
  * problem_report.py: Introduce a fourth optional parameter "fail_on_empty"
    to file pointer tuples which causes write() to raise an IOError if no data
    was read. Add test cases.
  * bin/apport: Enforce non-emptyness of CoreDump.
  * problem_report.py: Add test case for delayed piping of data passed as file
    object pointers. This was supposed to explain the reason for getting bugs
    with zero-byte core dumps, but already works correctly.
  * apport/report.py, check_ignored(): round the mtime to an int (just like
    mark_ignore() does), to not get wrong results on file systems that support
    subsecond file timestamps. This fixes running the test suite on the live
    CD.
  * test-apport: Clarify assertion message if /var/crash is not empty.

 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:14:36 +0200

It does not actually solve the original problem, though, that apport sometimes generates crash reports with empty core dumps.