Comment 6 for bug 1370259

Sorry for the late answer, this fell through the cracks. Did you actually test that this works? I. e. can a normal user actually read /dev/nvram? Currently the "cat /dev/nvram" is ran as root via attach_root_command_outputs(), and requiring root was the main reason why this "cat" approach was taken in the first place.

Does /dev/nvram actually contain text information and is this a locale/encoding problem? Or is it binary data, and unrelated to encodings?

With 14.10's apport, instead of cat the hook could call "base64 /dev/nvram" or a similar command which provides plaintext. But otherwise I think it would be better to fix attach_root_command_outputs() to get along with binary outputs.

> One dummy question remaining, how getting the tar file from the ascii output file if we need to ?

You can use "apport-unpack" to decode the apport report file into individual files (named by keys), and then just use tar to extract them further.