crash notification pops up repeatedly

[Alex Mauer]

When the tray icon for "crash report detected" pops up the "bubble" notification, clicking the close button on that notification closes it but then it pops up again and again and again. It should only be necessary to close it once.

Amateur diagnosis (guess) of the problem:
the crash report detection system uses some method to watch a directory for changes. (inotify on /var/crash?). As the crash report file is written, it changes multiple times. Each time it changes, the crash report detection system is notified of the change. And each time it is notified, it pops up the notification bubble.

[Ian MacGregor (ardchoille42)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this problem.

Please provide more information. Which version of gnome are you running? Which app(s) are you attempting to launch just before this happens?

[Alex Mauer (hawke)]

I am running gnome from Ubuntu Hardy.

I am not attempting to launch any application. This occurs when a system application crashes. In this case, it was aptitude. It crashed, and while apport was running, the notification icon appeared in the system tray and continually popped up the bubble notification until apport was done.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release (stable Hardy)? Thanks in advance.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I can confirm this. The problem is, as the reporter described, because the files in /var/crash are constantly changing whilst Apport is doing it's job.

When something changes in /var/crash, update-notifier calls /usr/share/apport-checkreports up to 5 seconds later to see if there are any new crash reports. apport-checkreports indicates that there are new reports if any files modified time in /var/crash is newer than it's accessed time (I think). Therefore, apport-checkreports will be called every 5 seconds whilst a report is being generated, and it will indicate that there are new reports each time it is called.

The logic in crashreport_check() in update-notifier will display the tray icon if there are new reports (as indicated by apport-checkreports) AND one of these is a system report (ie, a crash of a root daemon - also indicated by apport-checkreports).

This doesn't happen with crashes of user applications, because update-notifier follows a different codepath which leads to apport-gtk being launched instead of the tray icon being directly displayed.

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

That you for that information Chris, sounds like you did your homework. I am assuming you know what you're talking about, so I will mark this bug as Triaged with Low priority so that a developer can begin working on a fix.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

I can confirm that this is annoying, and should be higher than low priority. The dialog should handle all crashes at once, and contain a buttons/checkboxes to upload all crashes at once.

[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.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for apport (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]