Apport attempts to file contents of stderr as tag in Launchpad (eg. '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' )

Bug #828629 reported by Paul Sladen
16
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
apport (Ubuntu)
Expired
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

When filing a bug, apport may include illegal or unintention characters as part of the Launchpad tags field, preventing further submission of the apport report. The causes the potential report to be returned to the previous "No, I need to report a new bug" page, with no obvious indication of what has gone wrong. Launchpad reports:

  1. "There is 1 error."
  2. Showing that, gives no indication of what might be wrong
  3. Drilling down and opening "Extra options" then highlights and shows:
  4. ''/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so'' isn't a valid tag name. Tags must start with a letter or number and be lowercase. The characters "+", "-" and "." are also allowed after the first character.
  5. The extraneous string that apport tried to submit in the middle of the tag field is:

  error: ld.so: object '/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded: ignored.

this likely came from stderr somewhere. Ideally apport should not attempt to populate the tag field with non-tag literal data, or if it needs to, to strip it first removing characters such as "':/." that are not allowed by Launchpad's tag field citeria.

Revision history for this message
Brian Murray (brian-murray) wrote :

It'd be interesting to know whether or not it was a source package hook or apport itself trying to add this as a tag. Do you happen to have any files in your /var/crash directory? If so you should be able to determine which crash file one was trying to add that strange tag and it'd be great if you could add it to the report.

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
importance: Undecided → Critical
importance: Critical → High
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Hernando Torque (htorque) wrote :

I'm the reporter of the dupe and I don't have any files in /var/crash. In my case the part it chokes on is "compiz-Fai" and the whole tag looks like this:

"precise running-unity precise running-unity precise running-unity ubuntu regression reproducible compiz-Fai"

Revision history for this message
Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson) wrote :

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.

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

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

Changed in apport (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Expired
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