DpkgTerminalLog is zipped when it shouldn't be

[Brian Murray]

Binary package hint: apport

apport-package reports include DpkgTerminalLog.txt and those seem to attached to bug reports as gz files although it isn't a binary file. This makes the triaging of apport-package bug reports more difficult as you have to download and unzip the log files. An example can be found in bug 716531.

I've poked around a bit and I'm not certain what characters in the file are causing it to be recognized as binary.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

What's causing this is the way that /usr/share/apport/package_hook attaches the log file:
        pr[mkattrname(l)] = (l,)
and
                pr[mkattrname(path)] = (path,)

will cause those files to be compressed. If you don't want that, you can use hookutils.attach_file instead, which won't compress them.

However, I think it's a bug in Launchpad that this results in the files being downloaded rather than viewed inline. It should be possible for the browser to transparently decompress them if the HTTP headers are set correctly.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

It seems that there may have been a change in Launchpad (in line with Matt's comments in comment #1) that allows this to work with new bugs like bug 837960 but for the original bug linked to in the description this does not work.

[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.]