apport-retrace: try older debug package versions

[Mark]

It is the second time now that the apport retracing service tells me:
"Crash report cannot be processed" and
"However, processing it in order to get sufficient information for the
developers failed (it does not generate an useful symbolic stack trace). This
might be caused by some outdated packages which were installed on your system
at the time of the report:"
However. Before and after the incident happenend, I had updated the whole system. So I can not do anything do help and to see if the bug still occurs with newer packages because they can not be installed. At least I do not know how.

This kind of problem has three main sources:

 * Retracers being broken for an extended period of time, as happened during Oneiric. Hopefully with the rewritten apport-retrace this should now happen a lot less often, as we dropped the dependency to the fragile fakechroot.

  There is no single "fix" for this, it's a question of continuously maintaining the retracers.

 * debug symbols missing. This is mostly a problem of Launchpad not supporting debug symbol packages yet, and our hack for fetching/publishing them just fails occasionally. This is not a bug in apport itself, but in how ddeb packages are handled in Launchpad/Ubuntu.

 * apport-retrace not trying to install older versions of packages, mostly because apt does not support this really. However, we can apply some hackery to work around this in principle. This is what the bug title says, and what is actually actionable in apport itself.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Another cause could also be that the retracing service was broken for a while and only reprocessed your bugs several days later. Can you please point me to some example bugs where this happened?

Did you actually have held back packages at that time, or was that just a conjecture?

[Mark (mark-wege)]

I did not have any packages held back. Here is the bug, where this happened
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/355885
With this one, I am not 100% sure, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/355290

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

OK, both of these were retraced swiftly, but indeed there were several packages which were newer on the master archive. Bugs are only rejected that way if the resulting stack trace is totally unusable, i. e. wouldn't give us any useful information for fixing the crash anyway.

Nevertheless, I keep this open, as a reminder to try to use older debug package versions.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Launchpad now has support for debug symbol packages and apport also check's for older package versions in Launchpad. I believe the fixes for this bug were made in the following merge proposal.

https://code.launchpad.net/~brian-murray/apport/use-launchpad/+merge/259839

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu laptop testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://laptop.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/356101