package_hook doesn't check bug patterns

[Brian Murray]

Binary package hint: apport

update-manager calls /usr/share/apport/package_hook during a distribution upgrade in the event of a package installation failure, however as far as I can tell this doesn't check bug patterns to see if the installation failure matches a pattern before reporting the bug.

I discovered this after writing a pattern for samba4 that checks the key "VarLogDistupgradeTermlog" for a specific message. I ran 'search-bugs --package samba4 --tags apport-package' and found bug 776733, bug 776676 and bug 776671 which all matched the pattern and were reported. These bugs should not have been reported at all since a pattern is written for them.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This should be resolved by adding a duplicate signature tag to apport-package bugs reported by apt.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Well a duplicatesignature would only help after the fact as the retracer would then mark these as a duplicates of the first one.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Actually, the bug here is probably that distribution upgrades which have a package install failure don't check bug patterns. The code in update-manager's DistUpgradeApport.py calls /usr/share/apport/package_hook which then files the bug and may not do a duplicate check.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

A recent example of this can be seen in bug 1004664.

[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.]