ubuntu-system-settings-wizard does not create /var/lib/apport/autoreport on first boot

[Steve Langasek]

On newly-installed devices, the /var/lib/apport/autoreport file is missing. This file is required to be present in order for /etc/init/apport-noui.conf to autosubmit crash reports to Canonical. It is supposed to be created by default, and because this is a configuration setting, it cannot be set at image build time because it needs to be in the read-write portion of the filesystem.

Since ubuntu-system-settings manages this file, and since the default setting should be restored on factory reset, I believe the right thing is for ubuntu-system-settings-wizard to create the file at the time it notifies the user of this policy on first boot. (Indeed, I had believed this was already being done. I'm not sure if this regressed, or if the requirement failed to be communicated.)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

I've uploaded apport to have this file created by apport-noui on install; but this won't help users who are upgrading unless they factory reset their device. I'm not sure if it still makes sense to have the wizard populate this setting or if we should just declare a flag day, telling our users that they need to either need to reflash, or change the setting in system-settings.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

This is the second time in recent memory we've run into the problem of upgrades and fresh install 'transition' files being treated differently (the other was with extrausers support). It probably won't be the last. I'd really like us to fix the bindmount support to handle this case. I believe stgraber is looking into that.

But if we wanted to avoid a flag day, we could add a boot-hook like we did for migrating the extrausers files for upgraded users.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

This was fixed in an apport upload:

apport (2.14.5-0ubuntu3) utopic; urgency=medium

  * apport-noui: make the package installation automatically enable
    autosubmission, which doesn't currently work on the phone without it;
    and update the package description accordingly. LP: #1351137.

 -- Steve Langasek <email address hidden> Fri, 01 Aug 2014 15:06:49 -0700

Note, however, that this won't work for upgrades. So some people won't have the fix.

Down the road if the wizard design calls for making this configurable, we can add the logic to the wizard. But for now, pre-installing the file seems best.