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This file summarizes the major and interesting changes for each release. For a detailed list of changes, please see the git history.

2.30.0 (2024-08-09)

Changed

  • whoopsie-upload-all: exit with 0 if whoopsie is disabled (LP: #2069360)
  • apport-retrace: exit without 0 on error
  • Add more type hints and mark Apport with py.typed marker
  • apt_dpkg: speed up APT Contents file parsing

Fixed

  • launchpad: don't systematically order retrace on private reports (LP: #2068933)
  • apt_dpkg:
    • fix parsing paths with spaces in APT Contents files
    • Map mirror to correct URL for the architecture
  • report: gdb_command: don't hardcode the GNU triplet for the search paths
  • recent-syslog: read stdout after process completion (LP: #2073935)
  • test:
    • determine divide-by-zero signal dynamically
    • Fix apport-retrace system tests on non-amd64 (LP: #2069815):
      • add different test for retrace with GDB if non-amd64
      • apport_retrace: be more flexible on stack trace format
      • apport_retrace: skip Jammy retracing if no gdb-multiarch on !amd64
      • fix _assert_cache_has_content checks on non-amd64
      • put apport-retrace temp files into /var/tmp
    • retrace: skip the test using divide-by-zero on s390x until LP #2075204 is fixed
    • fix race condition in wait_for_gdb_sleeping_child_process (LP: #2073933)
    • fix flaky test_crash_system_slice (LP: #2076186)

2.29.0 (2024-06-13)

Changed

  • remove dependency on python-requests
  • apport:
    • Ignore container crash reports from systemd-coredump (LP: #2063349)
    • do not modify permission of existing /var/crash or create /var/crash with setgid permission (mode 3777) (LP: #2066995)

Fixed

  • apport-retrace:
    • initialize gdb_sandbox (pylint 3.2.2 complaint)
    • fix writing report to given --output
    • install base-files first for setting up usrmerge symlinks (LP: #2067120)
  • apt_dpkg: fix finding source for /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6
  • launchpad: fix dynamic adaption of chunck size
  • report:
    • fix determining bug report URL for Thunderbird (LP: #2056758)
    • Fix possible None.startswith() call
    • fix UnboundLocalError in add_kernel_crash_info
    • Fix retracing crashes on Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) (LP: #2067120)
  • setup: determine udev directory dynamically

2.28.1 (2024-04-18)

Changed

  • Format Python code with black 24.2

Fixed

  • apt_dpkg:
    • fix heuristic for determining primary mirror with DEB822 sources
    • fix reading comment only entries in APT deb822 sources
  • report:
    • fix reporting invalid SourcePackage
    • Fix crash if the user is a dynamic user
    • Ignore missing COREDUMP_FILENAME (LP: #2058380)
  • ui: show error message if webbrowser.open() fails
  • test:
    • use sysvinit-utils for test_get_dependencies_depends_only
    • fix date in test_crash_apport_from_systemd_coredump
    • support running tests directly with pytest
    • fix integration tests for bash >= 5.2.21-2ubuntu2 and coreutils >= 9.4-3ubuntu1 (LP: #2054902)
    • fix deletion of the tmpdir in test_run_report_bug_noperm_pid
    • fix mypy 1.9.0 complains

2.28.0 (2024-02-22)

Added

  • apt_dpkg: Add basic support for mirror+file: URIs
  • problem_report: support reading values compressed with Zstandard
  • support systemd-coredump as core dump handler (LP: #2048136)
  • set signal name during crash collection (SignalName in report)

Changed

  • setup:
    • Replace distutils by setuptools to support Python 3.12
    • set minimum Java release to 8 (LP: #2045705)
  • remove support for Upstart
  • apport-cli/apport-kde: show the most interesting fields first in the details view (similar to apport-gtk)
  • ui:
    • only show string values in details view
    • remove skipping crashes that happened during logout (LP: #2043393)
  • run common hooks in alphabetical order
  • dpkg: memorize the get_system_architecture method

Fixed

  • raise "GDB not found" as soon as detected (LP: #2031919)
  • apt_dpkg: Skip parsing non-deb files with dpkg-deb
  • ui: don't rely on Dependencies to know if collect_info() has been run (LP: #2038650)
  • bash-completion: Do not use ls in completion (LP: #1850804)
  • Fix MachineType f-string interpolation (regression in 2.27.0)
  • Correct CrashDatabase.get_id_url() for testing Launchpad instances
  • apport-unpack: fix reading from stdin
  • apport-kde: fix AttributeError in ui_question_file()
  • Rework apport-retrace to handle unbound crashid (LP: #2051512)
  • Use context manager when manipulating GzipFiles (LP: #2051512)
  • apport: fix UID in report filename for suid programs
  • test:
    • Skip test_get_file_package_diversion if the system has no diversion (LP: #2028879)
    • Silence false inconsistent-return-statements (from pylint 2.17.4)

2.27.0 (2023-07-24)

Added

  • Add support for deb822 APT sources
  • crash-digger: Add support for using a GDB sandbox (--gdb-sandbox)

Changed

  • Already add package info during Python crashes
  • apport:
    • Demote debug gdbus log to debug level
    • Demote non-error log messages to info level
  • Use f-strings everywhere
  • Increase maximum line length to 88
  • test: Rely on pytest and drop support running unittest directly
  • Drop Python < 3.10 support
  • Move pylint overrides to affected files instead of disabling the checks globally

Fixed

  • apport-unpack: Catch MalformedProblemReport on extraction (LP: #1997912)
  • Correct range of system users/groups from 499 to dynamic 999
  • Fix raising OSError if _command_output() runs into a timeout
  • Use ProblemReport for running generic hook manually
  • Fix type hints and run mypy in the CI
  • Fix spelling mistakes found by codespell
  • ui: Fix translating the web browser opening error message
  • test:
    • Clear environment for test_run_as_real_user_no_sudo
    • Fix check for full name in test_run_crash_anonymity
    • Fix false positives for test_run_crash_anonymity
    • ui: fix hangup on test failure

2.26.1 (2023-04-12)

Added

  • Add general hook wayland_session.py

Changed

  • Allow recent_syslog to collect all journal messages that the user can see by setting journald_system_only=False
  • Replace sudo by dropping privileges ourselves

Fixed

  • SECURITY UPDATE: viewing an apport-cli crash with default pager could escalate privilege (LP: #2016023). Do not run sensible-pager as root if using sudo/pkexec
  • Catch HTTPError in UserInterface.file_report (LP: #2008638)
  • Print proper error message if /proc/<pid> is gone (LP: #2008638)
  • Safely handle malformed /proc/<pid>/environ
  • Use URL for debug bug pattern URL in etc/apport/crashdb.conf
  • Do not drop environment variables when calling GDB (LP: #2012374)
  • apport-kde: Fix showing progress in the progress bar
  • Only open browser as user (via sudo) if running as root
  • Fix parsing options with spaces in sources.list (LP: #1822712)
  • tests: Mock query to Github in integration test

2.26.0 (2023-02-23)

Added

  • Add GitHub crash database for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and snaps
  • Report to GitHub if snap contact points to GitHub

Changed

  • test: Specify Python files for linters directly
  • Format code with black 23.1
  • Already add package info during crash (to prevent wrong package versions if packages are updated between the crash and reporting)
  • Remove dots from Snap.* report keys (for consistency)

Fixed

  • Convert values for the keys SnapChanges, SnapConnections, and SnapInfo.* from bytes to str
  • Support running signal crash via socket tests in containers

2.25.0 (2023-02-10)

Added

  • Add add_tags() and get_tags() to ProblemReport
  • Add general hook image.py for collecting cloud build info (LP: #1724623)

Changed

  • Unify error message for MalformedProblemReport
  • Use inclusive names. This includes renaming the directory /etc/apport/blacklist.d to /etc/apport/report-ignore and /etc/apport/whitelist.d to /etc/apport/report-only. Keep reading the old directories for backward compatibility until Apport 3.0.
  • Deprecate apport.unicode_gettext(). Please use gettext.gettext() directly instead.

Fixed

  • Catch UnicodeDecodeError on a malformed problem report (LP: #1996040)
  • Fix TypeError in error(): not enough arguments for format string (LP: #1562477)
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Use NoninteractiveHookUI for add_hooks_info (LP: #2003098)
  • tests:
    • Mock init_error_log in unit tests
    • Fix test failures with Python 3.11
    • Fix test_deleted_working_directory for pytest-cov 4.0

2.24.0 (2022-12-07)

Added

  • Add apport.service as alternative to the init.d script

Changed

  • build: Bump source/target Java version to 7
  • Split bash completions by command

Fixed

  • Address complaints from pylint 2.15.5
  • Catch malformed problem reports (LP: #1996040)
  • Catch ValueError: not enough values to unpack (LP: #1995100)
  • Catch FileNotFoundError for missing desktop files (LP: #1997753)
  • Catch binascii.Error: Incorrect padding (LP: #1997912)
  • Catch AttributeError: NoneType object has no attribute origins (LP: #1997973)
  • Add main category System to apport-kde-mime.desktop
  • data/apport: Fix ignoring SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ
  • tests:
    • Fix path for installed apport-cli
    • Determine source package dynamically in test_run_crash_kernel (LP: #1992172)

2.23.1 (2022-10-05)

Changed

  • Disable debuginfod when collecting a report (LP: #1989803)

Fixed

  • apport-cli: Fix AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'fileno' (LP: #1991200)
  • apport-bug: Add /snap/bin to PATH for Firefox snap on Lubuntu (LP: #1973470)
  • tests:
    • Wait for test process to be started to fix AssertionError in test_omit_all_processes_except_one (LP: #1989365)
    • Fix psutil.NoSuchProcess in wait_for_gdb_child_process (LP: #1989371)

2.23.0 (2022-08-22)

Added

  • Add support for qastaging.launchpad.net
  • apport-kde: Implement "Examine locally" for KDE as well
  • tests/run-linters: Run also pylint and pydocstyle (if present)

Changed

  • tests: Use sleep instead of yes for tests
  • Open files explicitly with UTF-8 encoding
  • Suggest installing python3-launchpadlib if missing and needed (LP: #1958059)
  • Query /etc/os-release for version codename. lsb_release will not be needed in most cases any more.
  • Determine system package manager during runtime
  • Address pylint errors and warning and most conventions and refactoring

Fixed

  • apport-gtk:
    • Fix importing the wrong Gdk version (regression in 2.22.0)
    • Gracefully handle import failure of gi (LP: #1980561)
    • Catch AssertionError when importing Gdk (LP: #1980238)
  • Fix trying to find debug packages for non-existing version
  • data/apport:
    • Initialize error log as first step
    • Fix PermissionError for setuid programs inside container (LP: #1982487)
    • Fix reading from stdin inside containers (LP: #1982555)
  • unkillable_shutdown: Fix failure if report file exists
  • apport-kde:
  • apport-unpack: Fix ValueError: ['separator'] has no binary content (LP: #1889443)
  • Fix _run_hook getting called with ui=None (LP: #1983481)
  • Break cyclic imports inside apport module
  • apport_python_hook: Try to create report directory if missing
  • tests:
    • Fix killing itself in test_unpackaged_script
    • Fix killing test executable too early (LP: #1980390)
    • Fix test_add_gdb_info_script on armhf
    • Fix wrong Ubuntu archive URI on ports
    • Fix KeyError in test_install_packages_unversioned
    • Fix IndexError in test_crash_setuid_drop

Removed

  • data/apport: Drop support for positional arguments
  • Remove partially implemented and unused login API
  • apport-kde: Drop old workaround for bug in SIP destructor (LP: #1980553)

2.22.0 (2022-06-27)

  • Fix several pycodestyle warnings
  • Sort Python imports with isort
  • Replace ProblemReport.get_date by ProblemReport.get_timestamp, fixes regression in 2.21.0 (LP: #1978487)
  • Format Python code with black
  • apport-gtk: Exclude trailing dot from URL links (LP: #1978301)
  • Fix AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'write', fixes regression in 2.21.0 (LP: #1979211)
  • apport_python_hook:
  • Replace deprecated imp module (LP: #1947425)
  • tests: Replace deprecated load_module()
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Fix 'EOFError' object has no attribute 'errno', fixes regression in 2.21.0 (LP: #1979681)
  • Convert documentation to Markdown

2.21.0 (2022-06-09)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: TOCTOU issue allows local user to read arbitrary files (LP: #1830858)
    • apport/report.py: Avoid TOCTOU issue on users ignore file by dropping privileges and then opening the file both test for access and open the file in a single operation, instead of using access() before reading the file which could be abused by a symlink to cause Apport to read and embed an arbitrary file in the resulting crash dump.
    • CVE-2019-7307
  • SECURITY UPDATE: apport reads arbitrary files if ~/.config/apport/settings is a symlink (LP: #1830862)
    • apport/fileutils.py: drop permissions before reading user settings file.
    • CVE-2019-11481
  • SECURITY UPDATE: TOCTTOU race conditions and following symbolic links when creating a core file (LP: #1839413)
    • data/apport: use file descriptor to reference to cwd instead of strings.
    • CVE-2019-11482
  • SECURITY UPDATE: fully user controllable lock file due to lock file being located in world-writable directory (LP: #1839415)
    • data/apport: create and use lock file from /var/lock/apport.
    • CVE-2019-11485
  • SECURITY UPDATE: per-process user controllable Apport socket file (LP: #1839420)
    • data/apport: forward crashes only under a valid uid and gid, thanks Stéphane Graber for the patch.
    • CVE-2019-11483
  • SECURITY UPDATE: PID recycling enables an unprivileged user to generate and read a crash report for a privileged process (LP: #1839795)
    • data/apport: drop permissions before adding proc info (special thanks to Kevin Backhouse for the patch)
    • data/apport, apport/report.py, apport/ui.py: only access or open /proc/[pid] through a file descriptor for that directory.
    • CVE-2019-15790
  • SECURITY REGRESSION: 'module' object has no attribute 'O_PATH' (LP: #1851806)
    • apport/report.py, apport/ui.py: use file descriptors for /proc/pid directory access only when running under python 3; prevent reading /proc maps under python 2 as it does not provide a secure way to do so; use io.open for better compatibility between python 2 and 3.
  • SECURITY UPDATE: World writable root owned lock file created in user controllable location (LP: #1862348)
    • data/apport: Change location of lock file to be directly under /var/run so that regular users can not directly access it or perform symlink attacks.
    • CVE-2020-8831
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Race condition between report creation and ownership (LP: #1862933)
    • data/apport: When setting owner of report file use a file-descriptor to the report file instead of its path name to ensure that users can not cause Apport to change the ownership of other files via a symlink attack.
    • CVE-2020-8833
  • SECURITY UPDATE: information disclosure issue (LP: #1885633)
    • data/apport: also drop gid when checking if user session is closing.
    • CVE-2020-11936
  • SECURITY UPDATE: crash via malformed ignore file (LP: #1877023)
    • apport/report.py: don't crash on malformed mtime values.
    • CVE-2020-15701
  • SECURITY UPDATE: TOCTOU in core file location
    • data/apport: make sure the process hasn't been replaced after Apport has started.
    • CVE-2020-15702
  • SECURITY UPDATE: multiple security issues (LP: #1912326)
    • CVE-2021-25682: error parsing /proc/pid/status
    • CVE-2021-25683: error parsing /proc/pid/stat
    • CVE-2021-25684: stuck reading fifo
    • data/apport: make sure existing report is a regular file.
    • apport/fileutils.py: move some logic here to skip over manipulated process names and filenames.
    • test/test_fileutils.py: added some parsing tests.
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Multiple arbitrary file reads (LP: #1917904)
    • apport/hookutils.py: don't follow symlinks and make sure the file isn't a FIFO in read_file().
    • test/test_hookutils.py: added symlink tests.
    • CVE-2021-32547, CVE-2021-32548, CVE-2021-32549, CVE-2021-32550, CVE-2021-32551, CVE-2021-32552, CVE-2021-32553, CVE-2021-32554, CVE-2021-32555
  • SECURITY UPDATE: info disclosure via modified config files spoofing (LP: #1917904)
    • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: properly terminate arguments in get_modified_conffiles.
    • CVE-2021-32556
  • SECURITY UPDATE: arbitrary file write (LP: #1917904)
    • data/whoopsie-upload-all: don't follow symlinks and make sure the file isn't a FIFO in process_report().
    • CVE-2021-32557
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Arbitrary file read (LP: #1934308)
    • data/general-hooks/ubuntu.py: don't attempt to include emacs byte-compilation logs, they haven't been generated by the emacs packages in a long time.
    • CVE-2021-3709
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Info disclosure via path traversal (LP: #1933832)
    • apport/hookutils.py, test/test_hookutils.py: detect path traversal attacks, and directory symlinks.
    • CVE-2021-3710
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Privilege escalation via core files
    • refactor privilege dropping and create core files in a well-known directory in apport/fileutils.py, apport/report.py, data/apport, test/test_fileutils.py, test/test_report.py, test/test_signal_crashes.py, test/test_ui.py.
    • use systemd-tmpfiles to create and manage the well-known core file directory in setup.py, data/systemd/apport.conf.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Utilize a release and architecture specific contents mapping.
  • test/test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: Update the test as we are using a contents mapping.
  • test/test_report.py: remove unused import of gzip.
  • apport/ui.py: Write an UnreportableReason for snaps and provide information on how to contact a snap developer. (LP: #1729491)
  • problem_report.py, bin/apport-unpack: restore some python2 code because the Error Tracker retracers need it.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: add in /usr/games and /usr/libexec as paths for executables in the contents mapping.
  • apport/ui.py: When saving a report for later processing if the filename to save it to ends with .gz then gzip the report file. Thanks to Yuan-Chen Cheng for the patch. (LP: #1837174)
  • Catch zlib.error when decoding CoreDump from crash file (LP: #1947800)
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Catch FileNotFoundError during process_report (LP: #1867204)
  • Drop Python 2 support
  • Grab a slice of JournalErrors around the crash time (LP: #1962454)
  • Fix several race conditions in test cases
  • Make test cases more robust against running in specific environments
  • Split the test suite into unit, integration, and system tests

2.20.11 (2019-05-16)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: Ensure that we properly handle crashes that originate from a PID namespace. Thanks to Sander Bos for discovering this issue. (CVE-2018-6552, LP: #1746668)
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: switch to using python3-launchpadlib to communicate with Launchpad thereby gaining retry capabilities and using its cache.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: utilize a global mapping of files to packages instead of searching a Contents.gz file multiple times, additionally write this mapping to disk so subsequent lookups and retraces are quicker. (LP: #1370230)
  • apport/ui.py: Handle old reports generated pre-apport with "remember" option. If the option isn't there, consider as false. (LP: #1791324)
  • apport/report.py: End our gdb batch script with a separator, to accommodate new exit codes from gdb 8.2.50. Thanks Steve Langasek!
  • data/apport: Introduce support for non-positional arguments so we can easily extend core_pattern in the future (LP: #1732962)
  • apport/report.py: Have add_gdb_info return a FileNotFoundError if gdb or the crashing executable are not found and modify whoopsie-upload-all to upload crashes in that situation. (LP: #1820132)
  • apport/report.py, apport/ui.py: raise ValueError if the pid is not accessible, display an error message for that or an invalid pid. (LP: #1396160)
  • switch from pyflakes to pyflakes3, drop some python2 code
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: strip /usr from binary names so the .list file will match.
  • test/*: switch from using deprecated imp to importlib, modify binary locations for merged-usr changes.
  • apport/report.py: reorder directories check for binaries so /usr is checked first.
  • data/whoopsie-upload-all: confirm the exception has an errno before using it in a comparison. (LP: #1824152)
  • test/test_report.py: update test_add_proc_info for function raising a ValueError.
  • apport/REThread.py, apport/ui.py: Avoid deprecation warnings by switching from isAlive() to is_alive().
  • apport/ui.py: if report.get_timestamp() returns None don't try and use it in a comparison. (LP: #1658188)
  • test/test_apport_valgrind.py: specify the location for true.
  • apport/ui.py: when using ubuntu-bug properly handle executables which start with /snap/bin. (LP: #1760220)
  • Fix PEP8 605 warnings and ignore 503,504 ones.
  • tests/test_ui_gtk.py: Increase the timeout so that when the autopkgtest infrastructure is busy the tests should not fail. (LP: #1780767)
  • problem_report.py: Decrease zlib compression level from 9 to 6. After a crash, this reduces the time Apport spends compressing the core dump by an order of magnitude. Thanks to Anders Kaseorg for the analysis and initial patch. (LP: #1537635)

2.20.10 (2018-05-09)

  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: when using a permanent sandbox better check for the package being already available thereby quantity of downloads.
  • apport/report.py: Use timeout parameter in subprocess to limit how long we'll wait for gdb to return information as gdb can hang with some core files.
  • data/apport: Fix PEP8 issues
  • apport/ui.py: Include ProblemType in reports which are updated as package hooks may expect the report to have a ProblemType. (LP: #1766794)
  • test/test_ui.py: modify run_crash_kernel test to account for the fact that linux-image-$kvers-$flavor is now built from the linux-signed source package on amd64 and ppc64el. (LP: #1766740)

2.20.9 (2018-02-14)

  • Re-enable container support. Thanks to Stéphane Graber! (LP: #1732518)
  • Add code preventing a user from confusing apport by using a manually crafted filesystem inside a combination of a user and mount namespace. Thanks to Stéphane Graber!
  • Add a check in apport receiver for the number of arguments so that should another argument be added later, the receiver will simply ignore the crash until it itself gets updated. Thanks to Stéphane Graber!
  • data/apport: add a second os.path.exists check to ensure we do not receive a Traceback in is_container_id(). (LP: #1733366)
  • apport/sandboxutils.py: when installing extra packages do not install the debug versions of them as this was installing gdb-dbg. If debug versions of a package are specifically required they can be passed as an extra-package.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: when reusing a sandbox do not remove conflicting packages when they conflict with themselves, or when they conflict with but also provide a virtual package.
  • bin/apport-retrace: add a --no-stracktrace-source option that does not do the work of creating a StacktraceSource field in the retraced report thereby decreasing the time to retrace.
  • apport/report.py: gdb's version 8.0.90 output changed from Warning to warning however to support using gdb in sandbox we need to support either case so check for both.
  • data/apport: add an exception handler in case either name space can not be found.
  • data/general-hooks/generic.py: change JournalErrors to contain errors not warnings. (LP: #1738581)
  • data/apport: wait for lock, with 30s timeout (LP: #1746874)

2.20.8 (2017-11-15)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: Denial of service via resource exhaustion and privilege escalation when handling crashes of tainted processes.
    • When /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable is set to 2, do not assume that the user and group owning the /proc//stat file is the same owner and group that started the process. Rather check the dump mode of the crashed process and do not write a core file if its value is 2. Thanks to Sander Bos for discovering this issue! (CVE-2017-14177, LP: #1726372)
  • SECURITY UPDATE: Denial of service via resource exhaustion, privilege escalation, and possible container escape when handling crashes of processes inside PID namespaces.
    • Change the method for determining if a crash is from a container so that there are no false positives from software using PID namespaces. Additionally, disable container crash forwarding by ignoring crashes that occur in a PID namespace. This functionality may be re-enabled in a future update. Thanks to Sander Bos for discovering this issue! (CVE-2017-14180, LP: #1726372)
  • apport/hookutils.py: modify package_versions to return an empty string if packages is empty. (LP: #1723822)
  • bin/apport-cli: read until instead of a single character when # of apport options is non-unique with a single character. Thanks to Chad Smith for the patch. (LP: #1722564)

2.20.7 (2017-08-29)

  • Fix new pep8 failures in artful - E722 do not use bare except.
  • apport/REThread.py: A bare except needs to be used so that we can catch the dialog being closed.
  • test/test_report.py: Be a little patient and give some time for the core file to show up.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Don't install the version mentioned in a versioned dep, rather install the latest version of that dep.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: search -proposed last so we prefer packages from other pockets.

2.20.6 (2017-07-18)

  • SECURITY FIX: Fix path traversal vulnerability with hooks execution. Ensure that ExecutablePath: fields loaded from reports do not contain directories. Until now, an attacker could trick a user into opening a malicious .crash file containing 
    ExecutablePath: /opt/../../../../some/dir/foo
    which would execute /some/dir/foo.py with arbitrary code. Thanks to Felix Wilhelm for discovering this! (CVE-2017-10708, LP: #1700573)
  • Stop installing a MIME handler for crash files as it ends up causing more trouble than it is worth.
  • bin/crash-digger: Set self.lp if the crashdb is Launchpad.
  • test/test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: cache directories contain the architecture in the path if if is not the native arch.
  • apport/crashdb_impl/launchpad.py: Don't make a contentless change to a bug, it just generates more bug mail.
  • apport/crashdb_impl/launchpad.py: Handle FailedToDecompressContent httplib2 error when downloading a broken attachment.
  • Convert regular expressions to raw strings to avoid deprecation warnings with Python version 3.6. Thanks to Michael Hudson-Doyle for the patch!
  • test/test_signal_crashes.py: a ulimit of 1M bytes isn't enough to produce a core file anymore so bump it to 10M.

2.20.5 (2017-05-12)

  • bin/apport-retrace: Comment on bug reports when an invalid core file is encountered. (LP: #1647635)
  • Switch to using HxW directory names for app icons instead of just one number. Thanks to Jeremy Bicha for the patch.
  • apport/ui.py: Ensure the Date field exists in a report before using it in a comparison. (LP: #1658188)
  • bin/apport-retrace: Add in a --gdb-sandbox switch which creates or utilizes a sandbox with the report's distribution release and the host system's architecture for installing and running gdb. (LP: #1517257)
  • apport/hookutils.py: Don't crash if .xsession-errors is not readable by the user. (LP: #1675928)
  • bin/apport-retrace: Be specific about which required field is missing from a report and not retracing it.
  • Disable report.test_add_gdb_info_abort_glib test case for now, as the glib assertion message is broken under current Ubuntu (LP: #1689344)

2.20.4 (2016-12-14)

  • SECURITY FIX: Restrict a report's CrashDB field to literals. Use ast.literal_eval() instead of the generic eval(), to prevent arbitrary code execution from malicious .crash files. A user could be tricked into opening a crash file whose CrashDB field contains an exec(), open(), or similar commands; this is fairly easy as we install a MIME handler for these. Thanks to Donncha O'Cearbhaill for discovering this! (CVE-2016-9949, LP: #1648806)
  • SECURITY FIX: Fix path traversal vulnerability with hooks execution. Ensure that Package: and SourcePackage: fields loaded from reports do not contain directories. Until now, an attacker could trick a user into opening a malicious .crash file containing 
    Package: ../../../../some/dir/foo
    which would execute /some/dir/foo.py with arbitrary code. Thanks to Donncha O'Cearbhaill for discovering this! (CVE-2016-9950, LP: #1648806)
  • SECURITY FIX: apport-{gtk,kde}: Only offer "Relaunch" for recent /var/crash crashes. It only makes sense to offer relaunching for crashes that just happened and the apport UI got triggered on those. When opening a .crash file copied from somewhere else or after the crash happened, this is even actively dangerous as a malicious crash file can specify any arbitrary command to run. Thanks to Donncha O'Cearbhaill for discovering this! (CVE-2016-9951, LP: #1648806)
  • test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: Move tests from Ubuntu 15.10 "wily" (which is EOL now) to 16.04 LTS "xenial".
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Explicitly set Dir::State::Status to the host dpkg status file for get_source_tree(), to work with apt 1.3~pre4.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Change the proxy settings to use "DIRECT" instead of "direct". The latter never really worked, but APT did not complain about it.
  • data/iwlwifi_error_dump: Fix add_package() call.
  • hookutils.py, attach_mac_events(): Only attach /proc/version_signature if that actually exists.
  • test/test_report.py: Slightly relax stack trace checks to also work with glibc 2.24.
  • apport-gtk: Specify module version with GI imports to avoid warnings. Thanks Anatoly Techtonik. (LP: #1502173)
  • test/run: Prefer pycodestyle over pep8.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: provide a fallback method if using zgrep to search for a file in Contents.gz fails due to a lack of memory. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • bin/apport-retrace: When --core-file is used instead of loading the core file and adding it to the apport report just pass the file reference to gdb.

2.20.3 (2016-07-28)

  • problem_report.py: Fail with proper exception when trying to assign a list to a report key, or when trying to assign a tuple with more than 4 entries. (LP: #1596713)
  • test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: Install GPG key for ddebs.ubuntu.com to avoid apt authentication errors.

2.20.2 (2016-06-19)

  • problem_report.py: Make assertion of invalid key names more verbose.
  • hookutils.py: Fix generation of valid report key names from arbitrary paths in attach_file() and related functions. This will now replace all invalid characters with dots, not just a few known invalid ones. (LP: #1566975)
  • problem_report.py: Instead of AssertionError, raise a ValueError for invalid key names and TypeError for invalid kinds of values. Thanks Barry Warsaw.
  • Don't ignore OSError in Report.add_gdb_info(), as we do want to fail with an useful error message if gdb cannot be called in apport-retrace. Move the catching to the UI as not having gdb installed is still fine for reporting clients. (LP: #1579949)
  • Show gdb error messages in Report.add_gdb_info() OSError exception when gdb fails. (LP: #1579897)
  • hookutils, attach_root_command_outputs(): Return str again, like before 2.15.2. (LP: #1370259)
  • Stop issuing "set architecture" gdb commands on ARM and Power; these only applied to 32 bit platforms and are apparently not needed any more with recent gdb versions. (LP: #1585702)
  • Disable report.test_add_gdb_info_abort_libnih test case for now, as libnih is broken under current Ubuntu (LP: #1580601)
  • do-release: Drop generation of ChangeLog. Interesting changes are already documented here, and the details can be seen in the bzr log.

2.20.1 (2016-03-31)

  • Fix signal_crashes.test_modify_after_start test when running as root.
  • Relax report.test_add_gdb_info gdb warning check, as this changed with gdb 7.10.90.
  • crash-digger: Untag bugs which cannot be retraced instead of stopping crash-digger. This led to too many pointless manual restarts on broken bug reports.
  • Disambiguate overly generic Python exceptions in duplicate signature computation: dbus-glib's DBusException wraps a "real" server-side exception, so add the class of that to disambiguate different crashes; for OSError that is not a known subclass like FileNotFoundError, add the errno. (LP: #989819)

2.20 (2016-02-12)

  • Reimplement forwarding crashes into a container, via activating the new apport-forward.socket in the container and handing over the core dump fd. This is a much safer way than the original implementation with nsexec. Thanks Stéphane Graber! (LP: #1445064)
  • Drop obsolete signal_crashes.test_ns_forward_privilege() test case. This code was dropped long ago.

2.19.4 (2016-01-26)

  • Fix fileutils.test_find_package_desktopfile test for symlinks and other unowned files in /usr/share/applications/.
  • Fix ui.test_run_crash_anonymity test case to not fail if the base64 encoded core dump happens to contain the user name, as that's just by chance.
  • Fix test_hooks.py for unreleased gcc versions which have a different --version format.
  • hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Stop attaching /var/log/udev. This was an upstart-ism, mostly redundant with the udev db and is not being written under systemd. (LP: #1537211)

2.19.3 (2015-12-08)

  • apport: Fix comparison against SIGQUIT to work for current Python versions.
  • apt/dpkg: Fix source record lookup in install_packages. Thanks Brian Murray!
  • hookutils.py, attach_gsettings_schema(): Don't replace the schema variable; fixes attaching relocatable schemas. Thanks Sébastien Bacher!
  • generic hook: Limit JournalErrors to the 1.000 last lines. This avoids long report load times when processes cause massive log spew. (LP: #1516947)
  • Add key filtering to ProblemReport.load().
  • Don't read the entire report when determining the CrashCounter. This avoids long delays for existing large reports.
  • test_python_crashes.py: Be less sensitive to the precise names of gvfs-metadata D-Bus service files.
  • Move backend_apt_dpkg -dbgsym test cases to Ubuntu 15.10.
  • Tests: Move to unittest's builtin "mock" module.

2.19.2 (2015-10-27)

  • SECURITY FIX: When determining the path of a Python module for a program like "python -m module_name", avoid actually importing and running the module; this could lead to local root privilege escalation. Thanks to Gabriel Campana for discovering this and the fix! (CVE-2015-1341, LP: #1507480)
  • apt/dpkg: Don't mark packages downloaded from Launchpad for installation by apt. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • Fix backend_apt_dpkg.test_install_packages_system for recent "Fall back to direct Launchpad ddeb download" fix. coreutils-dbgsym should now always be available independent of whether the local system has ddeb apt sources.
  • test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: Reset internal apt caches between tests. Avoids random test failures due to leaking paths from previous test cases.

2.19.1 (2015-10-07)

  • Consistently intercept "report file already exists" errors in all writers of report files (package_hook, kernel_crashdump, and similar) to avoid unhandled exceptions on those. (LP: #1500450)
  • apt/dpkg: Fall back to direct Launchpad ddeb download if we can't find it in the apt cache. Thanks Brian Murray! (LP: #1500557)
  • doc/data-format.tex: Clarify that key names are being treated as case sensitive (unlike RFC822).

2.19 (2015-09-24)

  • apport: Drop re-nicing. This might decrease the time a user has to wait for apport to finish the core dump for a crashed/hanging foreground process. (See LP: #1278780)
  • kernel_crashdump: Enforce that the log/dmesg files are not a symlink. This prevents normal users from pre-creating a symlink to the predictable .crash file, and thus triggering a "fill up disk" DoS attack when the .crash report tries to include itself. Thanks to halfdog for discovering this! (CVE-2015-1338, part of LP: #1492570)
  • SECURITY FIX: Fix all writers of report files (package_hook, kernel_crashdump, and similar) to open the report file exclusively, i. e. fail if they already exist. This prevents privilege escalation through symlink attacks. Note that this will also prevent overwriting previous reports with the same same. Thanks to halfdog for discovering this! (CVE-2015-1338, LP: #1492570)
  • apport: Ignore process restarts from systemd's watchdog. Their traces are usually useless as they don't have any information about the actual reasaon why processes hang (like VM suspends or kernel lockups with bad hardware) (LP: #1433320)
  • Switch all executables to use Python 3 by default.

2.18.1 (2015-09-10)

  • test_hooks.py: Adjust for gcc executable names that don't include the minor version number.
  • When determining the logind session and $XDG_SESSION_ID is not set, fall back to reading it from /proc/pid/cgroup.
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Intercept OSError too (e. g. "No space left on device"). (LP: #1476258)
  • apport-retrace: Only consider the file name of a source file, not its path; the latter often contains parts like "../" or directories which are specific to a build machine. This fixes most broken StacktraceSource results. (LP: #1462491)
  • packaging.py: Only consider first word in /etc/os-release's NAME value. This works around Debian's inconsistent value. (LP: #1408245)
  • Unify and simplify Package: field generation in kernel_crashdump, kernel_oops, and package_hook by using the new Report.add_package() method. (LP: #1485787)
  • sandboxutils.py, make_sandbox(): Make "Cannot find package which ships Executable/InterpreterPath" fatal, to save some unnecessary package unpack cycles. (LP: #1487174)

2.18 (2015-07-17)

  • Fix backend_apt_dpkg.test_install_packages_permanent_sandbox test to more carefully restore the environment and apt config.
  • Enable suid_dumpable in the init.d script to also get Apport reports about suid, unreadable, and otherwise protected binaries. These will be "system reports" owned and readable by root only.
  • init.d script: Fix tab usage inconsistencies.
  • apport-gtk: Use GtkWidget::valign property instead of GtkMisc::yalign which is deprecated in GTK 3.16. Thanks Iain Lane.
  • sandboxutils, make_sandbox(): Don't exit with 0 (success) if the ExecutablePath does not exist. (LP: #1462469)
  • sandboxutils, make_sandbox(): Fix second round of package installs to go into permanent root dir as well.
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): If a requested package version is not available from apt in the given archive, try to download it from Launchpad. Thanks to Brian Murray!
  • kerneloops: Fix crash when determining the version of a custom kernel. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1468154)
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): Ignore -dbg packages whose descriptions contain "transitional". (LP: #1469635)
  • Keep "[origin: ...]" information in Package: and Dependencies: fields for native-origins.d/ origins, so that it's possible to retrace them. Thanks Brian Murray! (LP: #1470572)
  • Add support for retracing with discovering and enabling foreign Launchpad PPA origins, as specified in reports' Package:/Dependencies: fields. Thanks Brian Murray!
  • hookutils.attach_wifi(): Shorten value of CRDA if iw isn't available on the system. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • Fix wrong assertion in crashdb.test_check_duplicate() which surfaces under Python 3.5. (LP: #1474539)

2.17.3 (2015-05-20)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: When /proc/sys/fs/suid_dumpable is enabled, crashing a program that is suid root or not readable for the user would create root-owned core files in the current directory of that program. Creating specially crafted core files in /etc/logrotate.d or similar could then lead to arbitrary code execution with root privileges. Now core files do not get written for these kinds of programs, in accordance with the intention of core(5). Thanks to Sander Bos for discovering this issue! (CVE-2015-1324, LP: #1452239)
  • SECURITY UPDATE: When writing a core dump file for a crashed packaged program, don't close and reopen the .crash report file but just rewind and re-read it. This prevents the user from modifying the .crash report file while "apport" is running to inject data and creating crafted core dump files. In conjunction with the above vulnerability of writing core dump files to arbitrary directories this could be exploited to gain root privileges. Thanks to Philip Pettersson for discovering this issue! (CVE-2015-1325, LP: #1453900)
  • apportcheckresume: Fix typo of "occurred", thanks Matthew Paul Thomas. (LP: #1448636)
  • signal_crashes test: Fix test_crash_setuid_* to look at whether suid_dumpable was enabled.
  • test/run: Run UI tests under dbus-launch, newer GTK versions require this now.

2.17.2 (2015-04-16)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: Disable crash forwarding to containers. The previous fix in 2.17.1 was not sufficient against all attack scenarios. By binding to specially crafted sockes, a normal user program could forge arbitrary entries in /proc/net/unix. We cannot currently rely on a kernel-side solution for this; this feature will be re-enabled once it gets re-done to be secure. (LP: #1444518)
  • do-release: Force UTC timezone for upstream changelog generation.
  • apport-kde: Fix crash when showing byte array values. Thanks Jonathan Riddell. (LP: #1443659)
  • Really create a better duplicate signature for recoverable problems, using ExecutablePath. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1316763)

2.17.1 (2015-04-14)

  • SECURITY UPDATE: Fix root privilege escalation through crash forwarding to containers. Version 2.13 introduced forwarding a crash to a container's apport. By crafting a specific file system structure, entering it as a namespace ("container"), and crashing something in it, a local user could access arbitrary files on the host system with root privileges. Thanks to Stéphane Graber for discovering and fixing this! (CVE-2015-1318, LP: #1438758)
  • apport-kde tests: Fix imports to make tests work again.
  • Fix UnicodeDecodeError on parsing non-ASCII environment variables.
  • apport: use the proper pid when calling apport in another PID namespace. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1300235)

2.17 (2015-03-31)

  • apport-kde: Port to Qt5. Thanks Harald Sitter!
  • Adjust signal_crashes.test_crash_setuid_{keep,drop} for systemd.
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Add systemd journal warnings and errors to the new "JournalErrors" field.

2.16.2 (2015-03-02)

  • hookutils.in_session_of_problem(): Check $XDG_SESSION_ID and /run/systemd/sessions instead of the cgroup, as the latter does not work under cgmanager.
  • ProblemReport: Set a timestamp of 0 in gzip compressed fields; they are meaningless and cause unnecessary jitter in the output.
  • launchpad backend: Fix unclosed file in upload().
  • launchpad backend: Fix wrong use of filter() with Python 3.
  • launchpad backend download(): Try to convert textual values from byte arrays into into strings.
  • ui.py, collect_info(): Fix crash on bug pattern checking with broken gzipped values. (LP: #1345653)
  • hookutils, attach_drm_info(): Avoid UnicodeDecodeErrors in Python 3 when reading binary files. Thanks Chad Miller. (LP: #1425254)
  • apport-gtk: Update legacy icon names to modern GTK ones, to fix icons under GNOME. Thanks Scott Sanbar. (LP: #1422176)
  • Move backend_apt_dpkg testsuite to use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
  • hookutils, attach_dmesg(): Only attach dmesg as CurrentDmesg, drop BootDmesg as /var/log/dmesg is upstart specific and thus not reliably correct any more.
  • hookutils, recent_syslog(): Read system logs from the journal when running under systemd, and fall back to /var/log/syslog if not.
  • hookutils, attach_mac_events(): Read kernel violation messages from dmesg instead of /var/log/kern.log, as that's specific to rsyslog and its configuration.

2.16.1 (2015-02-10)

  • Set gettext translation domain in setup.cfg, so that tools like dh_translations pick it up and show correct polkit translations. Thanks to Aron Xu! (LP: #1306857)
  • Report.get_logind_session(): Check $XDG_SESSION_ID and /run/systemd/sessions instead of the cgroup, as the latter does not work under cgmanager.

2.16 (2015-02-06)

Improvements/behaviour changes:

  • Add a new method ProblemReport.extract_keys() which writes binary keys (which can be very large) directly to files without loading them all into memory first. Use that in apport-unpack. Thanks Louis Bouchard! (LP: #1307413)
  • launchpad backend: Work with Python 3, now that launchpadlib exists for Python 3. (LP: #1153671)
  • apport-bug, apport-gtk: Also check for $WAYLAND_DISPLAY, to use apport-gtk instead of apport-cli under Wayland. Thanks Tim Lunn. (LP: #1418766)
  • apport-gtk: When running under Wayland, avoid Gdk/Wnck operation for setting crash window modal to the PID of the crashed window; these only work under X11.
  • Don't install the test suite any more, to save 1 MB of installed space. It can be run out of trunk easily enough, and distributions can install it from tests/ if they desire.

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils, attach_root_command_outputs(): Fix UnicodeDecodeError crash for non-textual values. (LP: #1370259)
  • ui.py: Only provide a UI to hooks if the crash db will accept the report. This avoids asking questions if the report is merely sent to whoopsie for Ubuntu stable releases. Thanks Brian Murrary. (LP: #1084979)
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Add package information to the report before calling package hooks. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • Fix check for available terminal when checking whether to display the "Examine locally" button.

2.15.1 (2014-12-19)

  • Robustify report.test_get_timestamp test.
  • Robustify signal_crashes.test_limit_size test.
  • Adjust launchpad crashdb testsuite to work against current Launchpad.
  • apt/dpkg _search_contents(): Check HTTP last-modified header to avoid re-downloading Contents.gz every day unless it actually changed. Thanks Brian Murray!
  • apport-gtk: Drop properties which are deprecated in GTK 3.14.

2.15 (2014-12-02)

  • ui.py: Robustify check if apport-retrace is installed. This brings back the "Examine locally" UI option. (LP: #1358734)
  • recoverable_problem: Handle the parent process going away while we're attempting to read from proc.
  • apport-retrace: Stop considering a package download error as transient; it can too easily lead to unnoticed eternal retry loops.
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Refactor to behave more reliably in case of overlapping crash processing. Thanks Steve Langasek and Brian Murray. (LP: #1354318)
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Remove crash reports that have a core dump which is broken and cannot be processed by gdb. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1376374)
  • Stop setting $PATH in the init.d script. It breaks assumptions from /lib/lsb/init-functions.d/ which might call other tools which are not in /bin; also, we generally shouldn't meddle with $PATH in individual scripts. (LP: #1372665)
  • When core size exceeds the limit (3/4 of available memory) and thus the core dump is skipped, log this to /var/log/apport.log. (LP: #1387835)
  • apport-gtk: Fix jump-to-top on first click of the details treeview. Thanks Marius Gedminas. (LP: #1387328)
  • apport-retrace: Fix location of cached Contents.gz when using --sandbox-dir. (LP: #1394798)
  • Fix backend_apt_dpkg.test_install_packages_permanent_sandbox test case with proxy env variables with latest apt.
  • data/whoopsie-upload-all: confirm that the crash file exists before trying to remove it. (LP: #1384358)

2.14.7 (2014-08-29)

  • Adjust backend_apt_dpkg.test_get_file_package() test: newer util-linux versions do not provide /etc/blkid.tab any more.
  • Fix interpretation of core dump ulimits: they are in bytes, not kB. (LP: #1346497)
  • apport-retrace: Don't require specifying an operation; default to updating the given .crash file. (LP: #1361242)
  • Write report even on UnreportableReasons, so that whoopsie can still upload them. (LP: #1360417)
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): Write a "packages.txt" into sandbox root directory to keep track of installed packages and their versions. Prerequisite for LP: #1352591.
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): Avoid re-downloading/installing packages which are already installed into a permanent sandbox. Prerequisite for LP: #1352591.
  • sandboxutils.py, make_sandbox(): Drop check for already existing files when dynamically resolving libraries and ExecutablePaths; with that, these packages would never get updated in a permanent sandbox. The new version tracking from above now takes care of that. (LP: #1352591)
  • Fix report.test_add_proc_info test to stop assuming that pid 1 is named "init", as one can specify a different one on the kernel command line.
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Check for truncated core dumps, and set UnreportableReason and raise an IOError on them. Handle this in apport-retrace and whoopsie-upload-all to fail properly instead of silently producing broken Stacktraces. (LP: #1354571)

2.14.6 (2014-08-18)

  • general-hooks/generic.py: Fix hook crash if there are non-distro libraries and no user interface.
  • collect_info(): Don't assume that reports have a ProblemType. Fixes crashes with apport-collect. (LP: #1325729)
  • apport-retrace: Declare -s/-g/-o as mutually exclusive, to get proper error messages instead of silent misbehaviour. (LP: #1352450)
  • apport-gtk: Drop usage of deprecated GTK stock items. (LP: #1348116)

2.14.5 (2014-07-29)

  • apport-bug: Stop checking the autoreport flag and calling whoopsie-upload-all; these two are different tasks, and that breaks bug reporting. (LP: #1339663)
  • apt/dpkg get_file_package(): If checking for uninstalled packages, don't use package information from the host system, but always look it up in the correct indexes. Otherwise this returns wrong results when files move to a different package between releases. Thanks Brian Murray! (LP: #1336062)
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): Disable fetching apt translation indexes, to save some bandwidth.
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Ignore crash reports with incomplete core dumps instead of crashing on them. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1329520)
  • etc/default/apport: Fix comment to use "service" instead of calling the init.d script directly.
  • whoopsie-upload-all: Collect hooks information to gather ApportVersion, NonfreeKernelModules, and SystemImageInfo. Do this before collecting package data to minimize hook run time. (LP: #1349579)
  • Adjust report.test_get_logind_session test to work with systemd >= 205.
  • Fix report.test_check_interpreted_twistd test to skip instead of fail if twisted is not installed.

2.14.4 (2014-07-03)

  • Adjust code to match latest pep8 checker.
  • Report.crash_signature_addresses(): Drop kernel architecture from StacktraceAddressSignature field. It isn't useful there (at most the ELF architecture, but we don't really need that either). This makes it easier to regenerate broken signatures from existing reports on different architectures. (LP: #1336565)

2.14.3 (2014-05-30)

  • Add kernel package version to the various kernel-related hooks. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1316845)
  • Use package name in duplicate signature for recoverable problems. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1316763)
  • Have whoopsie-upload-all upload recoverable problems. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1319099)

2.14.2 (2014-04-30)

  • Delay the import of the glob and re modules in the python apport hook, and only import them when needed. Speeds up interpreter startup time by 50%. Thanks Matthias Klose! (LP: #1307684)
  • Move error handling for invalid .crash files into collect_info(), so that it also applies when using the "Show Details..." button in the UI. Otherwise the UI just hangs eternally at this point when encountering broken core dumps. (LP: #1282349)
  • apt/dpkg install_packages(): Try to install the requested package version instead of always picking the most recent one. This should improve retracing results for older crash reports. Thanks to Brian Murray for inspiring this.
  • sandboxutils.py, make_sandbox(): When determining packages to install from ProcMaps, look up and use the package versions from the reporter, to improve retracing results. Thanks Brian Murray for the initial patch!
  • iwlwifi_error_dump: Make reports private, and subscribe canonical-kernel-team. Thanks Seth Forshee. (LP: #1313818)
  • signal_crashes test: Time out after 5 seconds if the test process does not terminate on the specified signal, to avoid eternal hangs.
  • signal_crashes test: Ensure that we don't inherit an ignored SIGQUIT from the caller.

2.14.1 (2014-04-04)

  • Fix FileNotFoundError from temporary launchpadlib cache dir cleanup. (LP: #1300474)
  • ui.py, open_url(): Skip any Python cleanup/atexit handlers in the forked xdg-open child, to avoid calling them twice. (Side issue of LP: #1300474 and LP: #1282713)
  • apport-kde: Work around crash in sip by skipping the destructors of SIP objects. Thanks Rohan Garg! (LP: #1282713)

2.14 (2014-03-31)

  • Add KernelCrash reports when iwlwifi encounters a firmware error (via the "error_dump" uevent and the new iwlwifi_error_dump helper). Thanks Seth Forshee!
  • launchpad: Really use a temporary launchpadlib cache dir by default. This avoids piling up gigabytes of useless cached data over time, which also tends to break every now and then.
  • Fix crash in logind session detection. Thanks Dimitri Ledkov! (LP: #1296026)

2.13.3 (2014-03-07)

  • Fix backend_apt_dpkg.test_get_file_package_uninstalled test that got broken in the previous release.
  • etc/cron.daily/apport: Cleanup .drkonqi files after 7 days. Thanks Harald Sitter.
  • ui.py: Try to grab session D-BUS address from user's session when being called through pkexec. (LP: #1287460)

2.13.2 (2014-01-27)

  • Fix crash if systemd cgroup is unreadable in /sys, such as in containers. (LP: #1270783)
  • apt/dpkg: Also consider Contents.gz from updates/security/proposed pockets, so that e. g. apport-retrace works for crash reports with files that are new in those. Thanks to Brian Murray for the initial patch. (LP: #1271258)
  • Only drop internal/private keys (starting with '_') from uploading to the crash DB and from the UI report views, but not already when updating the report. (LP: #1272505)
  • data/apport: Fix stdout/stderr initialization of the error log, don't close the original fd after dup2'ing as it is usually already fd 1. This makes Apport work with Python 3.4. (LP: #1272355)
  • Adjust report tests to work with Python 3.4 (LP: #1272355)

2.13.1 (2014-01-10)

  • Fix report.test_get_timestamp test for running in other time zones.
  • Fix erroneous "gdb-multiarch not installed" warnings in ui tests.
  • Fix ui.test_run_crash_older_session test for running as root.
  • Fix ui.test_run_crash_older_session for different file system file orders.

2.13 (2014-01-10)

Improvements:

  • whoopsie-upload-all: Add a -t/--timeout option. In CI environments it is undesirable to block on upload for 30 mins, but it's still a reasonable timeout on less well connected devices.
  • Do not report keys starting with '_' to the crash database. This can be used for keeping private keys in .crash files between crash and report time, or to store data between hooks etc., without cluttering reports.
  • UI: In "run all pending crashes" mode, skip reports that happened during logout in a desktop (specifically, logind) session; they are uninteresting and confusing to see at the next login. (LP: #1033932) They can still be reported manually with running the .crash file directly, but this sufficiently reduces the need to explicitly flag whether the report concerns a logout crash. (LP: #1067646)
  • Add support for PID namespaces (Linux containers): Crashes originating from a container on a system running a >= 3.12 kernel will be automatically redirected to apport inside the container, or ignored if apport is not installed in the container. Thanks to Stéphane Graber!

Bug fixes:

  • test_signal_crashes: Clean up unexpected reports after every test, to avoid breaking all subsequent tests.
  • test_signal_crashes: Stop checking that gdb prints nothing on stderr, as latest gdb 7.6.50 now almost always prints some about missing source files.
  • setup.py: Make updating of hashbangs work when building without Java, and also apply it on bin/.
  • Print a warning when trying to retrace a report from a foreign architecture and gdb-multiarch is not installed. (LP: #1239395)
  • etc/init.d/apport: Don't change core_pattern when running in a container, as this influences the host and other containers, too. (LP: #1267728)

2.12.7 (2013-11-19)

  • Properly fall back to lsb_release if /etc/os-release is invalid.
  • report.py, add_proc_info(): Add "CurrentDesktop" field with the value of $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP, if present. (LP: #1247904)
  • fileutils.py, get_all_system_reports(): Filter out "guest..." users, they might have a system UID. (LP: #1250679)
  • apt/dpkg: Don't call dpkg-divert with full path, it moved in Ubuntu 14.04.

2.12.6 (2013-10-25)

  • SECURITY FIX: For setuid programs which drop their privileges after startup, make the report and core dumps owned by root, to avoid possible data disclosure. Also, change core dump files to permissions "0600". Thanks to Martin Carpenter for discovering this! (CVE-2013-1067, LP: #1242435)
  • sandboxutils.needed_runtime_packages(): Create cache directory for Contents.gz if missing. (LP: #933199)
  • apt/dpkg: Recognize options in apt sources.list. (LP: #1238620)

2.12.5 (2013-09-27)

  • Report.add_os_info(): Do not overwrite already existing data. (LP: #1226776)
  • kernel_oops hook: Collect uname at the time of invoking the hook, instead of at data collection time. (LP: #1226776)
  • Replace fixed size icons with PNGs, which are more efficient and avoid rendering artifacts. (LP: #1231763)

2.12.4 (2013-09-19)

  • Update icons to new design from Vishnoo Charan Reddy, many thanks! (LP: #1079639)

2.12.3 (2013-09-19)

  • ProblemReport.write_mime(): Adjust MIMEText handling to latest Python 3.3 upstream changes which now don't tolerate passing bytes any more. (LP: #1227381)
  • apport-gtk: Don't use obsolete add_with_viewport() method any more.
  • Fix ui_present_report_details() "modal_for" keyword for all UI implementations, so that --hanging works for -cli and -kde, too. (LP: #1213790)

2.12.2 (2013-09-17)

  • fileutils.py, get_{new,all}_reports(): Don't consider reports which are readable, but not writable. (LP: #1098844)
  • test_ui_kde.py: Cleanly skip the test if PyQt/PyKDE are not installed, instead of failing.
  • crash-digger: Write pid into lock file. Thanks Steve Langasek.
  • apport-gtk: When loading a Bug report from a file, properly set up for bug reporting mode. (LP: #1226140)
  • Move "program is not installed any more" check from report loading into data collection, so that crash reports can be moved and reported on machines without that program installed. (LP: #1226030)

2.12.1 (2013-08-19)

  • sandboxutils.py, make_sandbox(): Install packages from Package: and Dependencies: fields also if we have a ProcMaps: field and there are any third-party packages. This fixes retracing crashes that use PPAs (as they don't have Contents.gz).
  • Robustify "progress bar visible" GTK and KDE UI checks for the faster collection due to dropping lsb_release.
  • Drop apport-noui in favour of whoopsie-upload-all. We don't want to process hooks when run noninteractively, since they may ask questions or determine a report is not due to a bug in Ubuntu. whoopsie-upload-all skips these hooks.
  • apport/report.py: Gracefully handle being unable to get the source package for a binary package, as when the latter does not exist in the cache. (LP: #1097773)

2.12 (2013-08-02)

Improvements:

  • recoverable_problem: Can take the PID as an argument.
  • Add data/whoopsie-upload-all: Process all pending crashes and mark them for whoopsie upload, but do not upload them to any other crash database. Wait until whoopsie is done uploading.
  • Eliminate multiple calls to lsb_release by caching the result. On systems which provide /etc/os-release, use that instead of lsb_release. (LP: #1164742)

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Show the Python major version in the error message about missing launchpadlib.
  • ui.py: Check if options for updating and reporting a new bug get used together, and give a proper error message in this case. (LP: #1071905)
  • apport: Fix typo of "Executable", leading to reports not being synced on upstart crashes. Thanks James Hunt. (LP: #1203744)
  • Rename apport-gtk-mime.desktop to apport-gtk.desktop and drop the old apport-gtk.desktop that wasn't even being installed. With that, the window will be shown as "Report a problem..." instead of "Apport-gtk" in GNOME shell and other DEs. Thanks Jeremy Bicha. (LP: #1207496)
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Fix crash if gdb cannot load the symbol map. (LP: #1171484)
  • apport-retrace: Fix crash when using --sandbox without --cache. (LP: #1197034)
  • Fix error message when PID is inaccessible. (LP: #1204718)
  • doc/data-format.tex: Drop unused "OS" and "OSRelease" fields, replace with "DistroRelease" which is actually being used. (LP: #1018387)

2.11 (2013-07-17)

Improvements:

  • data/apport-noui: A noninteractive frontend for automatic error reporting. apport-bug will use this if the /etc/apport/autoreport flag file exists.
  • hookutils.py, attach_upstart_logs(): Also attach ~/.cache/upstart/application-.log for any *.desktop file shipped by a package.

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py, attach_conffiles(): Fix check for inaccessible or modified conffiles. (LP: #1192899)

2.10.2 (2013-05-22)

Bug fixes:

  • Resolve symlinks in file references in Python crash signatures. (LP: #1179979)
  • Fix endless loop of EOFErrors with broken core dumps. (LP: #1168849)
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Fix crash if gdb did not determine an assertion message. (LP: #1171484)
  • apt/dpkg: Fix get_file_package()'s "release" field to actually mean DistroRelease:, not a distro code name. This now requires a previous call to install_packages() with a configdir, which needs to have a file //codename with the release's code name in it.
  • sandboxutils.py: Call get_file_package() with the report's release, so that we actually get files from the target release, not the host release.
  • test_hookutils.py: Don't assume that /etc/motd exists.

2.10.1 (2013-05-14)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix ui.test_run_crash_anonymity_escaping test when running as root.
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash when trying to adjust a distro-only bug task if the bug also already has a distropackage task.
  • apt/dpkg: When there is no -dbg package, install all -dbg packages of the corresponding source package, and only then fall back to -dbgsym. (LP: #1003234)

2.10 (2013-04-30):

Improvements:

  • Support retracing foreign powerpc reports, thanks Steve Langasek.
  • apport/report.py: Generate a crash signature for suspend/resume failures.
  • hookutils.py: Add attach_upstart_logs(), thanks Steve Langasek.
  • hookutils.py, in_session_of_problem(): Port from ConsoleKit to logind.

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.attach_conffiles(): Fix IOError crash on inaccessible conffiles; mark them as '[inaccessible: ]' instead. (LP: #1154536)
  • hookutils.in_session_of_problem(): Fix crash when the current locale is invalid. (LP: #1154896)
  • data/gcc_ice_hook: Fix crash with source files that have non-UTF8 data. (LP: #1045283)
  • apport/report.py: Handle the case where the user has been removed from the system, but one of its still-running binaries crashes (LP: #1163453).
  • Fix anonymization of user/GECOS fields with regexp control characters like '+'. (LP: #985049)
  • Run tests under LC_CTYPE=C and unset LANG as well, to discover assumptions about UTF-8 locales. Fix the two failing tests.
  • Fix UnicodeDecodeError when apport encounters non-ASCII environment variables. (LP: #1172638)

2.9.2 (2013-03-19):

Improvements:

  • report.py, add_package_info(): Add "[origin: unknown]" tag to Package/Dependencies fields for non-distro package whose origin cannot be determined. (LP: #1148116)
  • Adjust kernel_crashdump to the format kdump-tools produces. Thanks Louis Bouchard.

Bug fixes:

  • Write core dumps on SIGQUIT if ulimit allows. Thanks Graeme Hewson. (LP: #1153662)

2.9.1 (2013-03-07):

Improvements:

  • launchpad.py: Add support for filing bugs as private. Document this in doc/crashdb-conf.txt. (LP: #1144647)

Bug fixes:

  • test_signal_crashes.py: Fix test_crash_apport() when being run under LD_PRELOAD.
  • Fix crash in error() and warning() if there is no sys.stderr. (LP: #1012445)
  • Fix Turkish translation to add missing keyboard accelerator. (LP: #648750)
  • fileutils.py, find_package_desktopfile(): Restrict to autostart and application .desktop files. (LP: #1147528)
  • apt/dpkg get_modified_files(): Fix crash when encountering non-ASCII file names in an ASCII locale. (LP: #1044014)

2.9 (2013-03-01):

Improvements:

  • fileutils.py, shared_libraries(): Return a "name → path" dict instead of just a set of names. Thanks Kyle Nitzsche.
  • sandboxutils.py: Support unpackaged executables, i. e. reports which do not have "Package" and "Dependencies" fields. For those, get required libraries from "ProcMaps". Thanks Kyle Nitzsche.

Bug fixes:

  • Add "com.ubuntu.apport.apport-gtk-root" polkit action for running apport-gtk through pkexec to access system crash reports. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • ui.py: Check $PKEXEC_UID in addition to $SUDO_UID for opening a browser.
  • apport/report.py: report if LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH are set. Thanks James Hunt.
  • apport-valgrind: Cleanly exit on keyboard interrupts. Thanks Kyle Nitzsche.
  • debian.py: Fix "string payload expected" crash when building the report. Thanks Dmitry Shachnev. (Debian #698010)
  • Move shared_libraries() and links_with_shared_library() from hookutils into fileutils, so that we can use it from apport-valgrind. Thanks to Kyle Nitzsche for the initial patch.
  • fileutils.shared_libraries(): Filter out virtual "linux-vdso" from result. Thanks Kyle Nitzsche.
  • apport-valgrind: Fix path to debug symbols in the sandbox.
  • ui.py, get_desktop_entry(): Fix for Python 2.

2.8 (2013-01-08):

Improvements:

  • Factor out sandbox management functions from apport-retrace into apport/sandboxutils.py, so that other programs can re-use the API easily. Thanks to Kyle Nitzsche for the initial work on this.
  • Generate a crash signature for kernel OOPSes.
  • Add "apport-valgrind" tool to produce valgrind reports in a temporary sandbox with debug symbols (similar to apport-retrace). Thanks Alex Chiang and Kyle Nitzsche!

Bug fixes:

  • Fix StacktraceAddressSignature generation on ARM. (LP: #1089778)
  • debian.py: Fix TypeError crash in payload generation. Thanks Ritesh Raj Sarraf.
  • apport_python_hook.py: Update "ExecutableTimestamp" field when mangling "ExecutablePath". (LP: #1077253)

2.7 (2012-12-10):

Improvements:

  • packaging.py, get_file_package(): Add optional "release" and "arch" arguments for getting a file's package for a foreign release or architecture. Implement this for apt/dpkg backend.
  • packaging.py, install_packages(): Add optional "architecture" argument for creating a sandbox for a foreign architecture. Implement this for apt/dpkg backend.
  • When a report's architecture does not match the system architecture, try to use gdb-multiarch (if available, as packaged on Debian/Ubuntu), and set architecture and gnutarget accordingly in gdb. This supports x86, x86_64, and ARM for now, so that reports from all these architectures can be retraced on an x86_84 machine. (LP: #1044437)
  • launchpad.py: Add "architecture" option to process reports for a foreign architecture.
  • Add exceptions from package hooks to new HookError_ report field, to make them more visible. Until now they were only written to stderr. (LP: #1086309)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix test_find_package_desktopfile test to not consider packages with only one "NoDisplay=true" .desktop file for the "has one desktop file" test.
  • report.py, mark_ignore(): Use home directory of actual effective user, not of $HOME. Fixes ignore file when using through sudo.
  • apport-cli: Fix showing of prompt. Thanks Dmitry Shachnev!
  • fileutils.py, mark_report_upload(): Do not try to remove the .uploaded file, as this is not owned by the user.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py, install_packages(): Set mirror to the one in the sandbox config.
  • apportcheckresume: Fix crash if state file does not exist.

2.6.3 (2012-11-30):

  • test_signal_crashes.py: Fix incompatibility with Python 3.3.
  • test_signal_crashes.py: Allow XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable, as it only shows whether or not it is set. (Test regression from 2.6)
  • debian.py: Only reject reports with useless stack traces if the report actually has a stack trace at all.
  • debian.py: Fix UTF-8 string handling. Thanks Ritesh Raj Sarraf.
  • debian.py: Fix crash on broken "Package" fields, as generated by current Debian/Ubuntu dkms package.
  • data/apport: Call fsync when writing upstart crash reports.
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Handle libnih's assertion messages. (LP: #997359)
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: Don't provide an option to restart a crashed application when the crash occurred in a thread (LP: #1033902).
  • apport-retrace: Disallow option -C without option -S. Thanks Kyle Nitzsche.
  • fileutils.py, mark_report_upload(): Refresh the .upload stamps if a previous version of the report was already uploaded, but another instance of the problem happened since then. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #1084296)
  • Ignore implausibly low addresses when computing StacktraceAddressSignature. These are usually artifacts from gdb when not having debug symbols, and having too many of them prevents proper client-side duplicate detection and proper bucketing in daisy. (LP: #1084996)
  • fileutils.py: Ignore .desktop files with NoDisplay=true. (LP: #1048524)

2.6.2 (2012-11-06):

  • problem_report.py: Fix UnicodeDecodeError crash under Python 2 when the report has an unicode field with an unprintable ASCII character < 20.
  • debian.py: Fix calling of parent accepts() method and return value. Thanks Ritesh Raj Sarraf.
  • bin/apport-retrace: Fix crash when not using --sandbox mode.
  • report.py, add_proc_info(): Throw correct exception if the executable path does not exist, to provide a more appropriate error message. (LP: #1065129)
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Check __glib_assert_msg for assertion messages, too.
  • REThread.py: Fix for Python 3.3.

2.6.1 (2012-10-01):

  • setup.py: Specify "-source 1.5" javac option as well, to avoid build failure with OpenJDK 7.

2.6 (2012-10-01):

  • setup.py: Build java module with "-target 1.5" option, so that you can run it with OpenJDK 6 even if you build with OpenJDK 7.
  • report.py, add_proc_info(): Show if $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is set.
  • Add apport/crashdb_impl/debian.py: Initial crash database implementation for the Debian BTS. Add configuration for it to etc/apport/crashdb.conf. Thanks Ritesh Raj Sarraf!
  • test_python_crashes.py: Robustify "$PYTHONPATH in ProcEnviron" check.

2.5.3 (2012-09-28):

  • data/apportcheckresume: Open report file in binary mode. (LP: #1040353)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: When throwing ValueErrors, show the non-existing package name. This makes it easier to debug such crashes.
  • launchpad.py: Replace characters from tags which are not allowed by Launchpad with '.' (LP: #1029479)
  • launchpad.py: Temporarily disable filing private bugs in the test suite, to work around the SSLHandshakeError error when downloading private attachments from staging.
  • hookutils.py, attach_root_command_outputs(): Ignore IOError crash about nonexisting files, which can happen if the user dismisses authorization. (LP: #1051222)
  • report.py, search_bug_patterns(): Fix bug patterns containing non-ASCII characters. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • apport_python_hook.py: Capture $PYTHONPATH and $PYTHONHOME environment variables for Python crashes. Thanks Brian Murray.

2.5.2 (2012-09-17):

  • test/run: Ignore root_info_wrapper with pyflakes.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Add recommended packages to "Dependencies:" field. (LP: #1014428)
  • test_hookutils.py, test_in_session_of_problem(): Use year 2038 for a future date instead of 2211, as current Python 3.2 now crashes with an OverflowError on 32 bit machines with later years.
  • Fix crash on broken .desktop files. (LP: #1039889)
  • apport-gtk: For console program crashes, say "stopped" instead of "closed". Add a subtitle label with a hint about hanging programs. Thanks Matt Price and Matthew Paul Thomas!
  • report.py: Fix crash on determination of Python module path when examining a crash of "python -m ...".
  • apport-kde: Fix crash with undefined QString under Python 3. Thanks Jonathan Riddell! (LP: #1028984)
  • launchpad.py: Add missing "Pre-release Freeze" status. Thanks Brian Murray!
  • report.py, _check_bug_pattern(): Fix bug pattern matching against binary values. Thanks Brian Murray for the original patch. (LP: #1016380)

2.5.1 (2012-08-22):

  • data/root_info_wrapper: Turn into a real file, a symlink can cause some packaging problems.

2.5 (2012-08-22):

Bug fixes:

  • test_recoverable_problem.py: Fix test for calling test runner with absolute path.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix crash on writing virtual_mapping.db when running with --sandbox-dir and -S system or giving no --cache.
  • REThread.py: Fix re-raising of exceptions in Python 3. Thanks Martin Packman! (LP: #1024836)
  • apport-retrace: Keep compressed CoreDump from .crash files instead of uncompressing them into memory. This dramatically reduces memory usage. (LP: #981155)

Improvements:

  • Add an apport.memdbg() function which prints out current memory usage if APPORT_MEMDEBUG is set. Annotate apport-retrace with it.
  • hookutils.py: Allow specifying a list of profile names when using attach_mac_events(). Thanks Marc Deslauriers.
  • hookutils.py, attach_root_command_outputs() and root_command_output(): Drop usage of sudo, kdesudo, and gksu, and replace with pkexec. For attach_root_command_outputs(), use a wrapper and proper .policy file which explains the action and works under every environment; thus attach_root_command_outputs() is preferred over root_command_output() now, as it provides a better user experience.
  • Package hooks which want to send the report to a different crash database than "default" can now also give the database specification itself in the "CrashDB" field, not just the DB name. With this, packages do not need to ship a separate /etc/apport/crashdb.conf.d/ file. Please see doc/package-hooks.txt for details. (LP: #551330)
  • report.py, add_hooks_info(): If reporting against a package/program in /opt, also search for package hooks in the corresponding /opt directory. This allows such hooks to define a custom crash database and thus report bugs against their own project instead of against the distribution. (LP: #1020503)

2.4 (2012-07-18):

Improvements:

  • apport_python_hook.py: For org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown exceptions, add a 'DbusErrorAnalysis' field to the report which points out whether any .service file provides the service it tried to talk to, and whether the processes for those are running. This helps to determine the root cause for such errors (missing dependencies, broken .service files, talking to the wrong bus, etc.) (LP: #1020572)
  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Use alsa-info.sh when available. Thanks David Henningson.
  • Add new "RecoverableProblem" report type for problems which the application can handle, but still wishes to notify the user and send a problem report about. As an example, the application may wish to notify the user because handling the error resulted in degraded functionality. The user interface may fail to load items, or the action just performed may not return any data. Applications call /usr/share/apport/recoverable_problem with a string of arbitrary NUL-separated key/value pairs that are added to the report. Thanks Evan Dandrea!

Bug fixes:

  • ui tests, test_wait_for_pid(): Fix eternal hang when running as root.
  • testsuite: Fix ResourceWarnings when running with Python 3.
  • test_python_crashes.py: Fix race condition in timeout test.
  • launchpad.py: Fix setting of 'Medium' importance on duplicate checking.
  • apport-retrace: Fix StacktraceSource generation for relative --cache paths.
  • crashdb.py, check_duplicate(): Do not try to mark a bug as duplicate of itself. This can happen when re-processing a previously retraced bug.
  • apport-retrace: Fix UnicodeDecodeError when encountering a non-ASCII source code file and running under a non-UTF-8 locale.

2.3 (2012-07-09):

Improvements:

  • launchpad.py: Rework test suite to not use Launchpad's +storeblob facility at all any more. It almost never works on staging and is horribly slow. Fake the bug creation from a blob by manually creating the comment and attachments ourselves, and just assume that storeblob works on production. Also change the structure to allow running every test individually.
  • crash-digger: Add --crash-db option to specify a non-default crash database name. (LP: #1003506)
  • apport-gtk: Add --hanging option to specify the process ID of a hanging application. If the user chooses to report this error, apport will terminate the pid with SIGABRT, otherwise it will send SIGKILL. The normal core pipe handler will be used to process the resulting report file, with a .hanging file in /var/crash to separate these from regular crashes.

Bug fixes:

  • apport: Also treat a binary as modified if the /proc/pid/exe symlink does not point to an existing file any more. (LP: #984944)
  • Fix PEP-8 violations picked up by latest pep8 checker.
  • ui.py: Do not ignore certain exceptions during upload which are not likely to be a network error.
  • launchpad.py: Recognize Launchpad projects for bug query and marking operations. (LP: #1003506)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix get_source_tree() to work with apt sandboxes.
  • apport-retrace: Turn StacktraceSource generation back on, now that it works with the current sandboxing.
  • launchpad.py: Ensure that upload chunk size does not underrun. (LP: #1013334)
  • apport_python_hook: Fix UnicodeEncodeError crash with Python 2 for exceptions with non-ASCII characters. (LP: #972436)
  • test_ui_kde.py: Fix occasional test failure in test_1_crash_details if the application ends before the "is progress bar visible" check is done.

2.2.5 (2012-06-21):

  • launchpad.py: Fix str vs. bytes crash for already known bugs, take 2. (LP: #1015788)
  • apport/ui.py, get_desktop_entry(): Disable interpolation, to correctly read desktop files with % signs. (LP: #1014341)
  • apport/ui.py: Fix rare crash if a report is already being updated in the background when the UI tries to update a previous version. (LP: #949196)
  • GTK and KDE UI tests: Avoid eternal hangs due to "this is not a distro package" error messages.

2.2.4 (2012-06-21):

Bug fixes:

  • test_apport_unpack.py: Fix test_unpack_python() test when running the system-installed tests.
  • data/java_uncaught_exception: Fix for Python 3.
  • test_signal_crashes.py: Show crash reports in /var/crash/.
  • test_crash_digger.py: Do not write crash reports of crash-digger into system /var/crash, use a temporary directory.
  • test/run: Wait for a previous xvfb server to finish before trying to start one. This fixes a race condition in the KDE UI tests which often failed to start up xvfb.
  • apport-cli: Unbreak "keep" option. (LP: #1007826)
  • launchpad.py: Fix str vs. bytes crash for already known bugs. (LP: #1015788)

2.2.3 (2012-06-15):

Bug fixes:

  • test/run: Do not run pep8 and pyflakes when running against the system installed Apport.
  • test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: For the "are we online" check, verify that we can download from http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/, not just whether we have a default route. The latter is not sufficient for e. g. buildd environments which are online, but are restricted by proxies or firewalls.
  • test_report.py: Call "sync" after test script write core dumps, to ensure that subsequent operations have a complete one.
  • test_signal_crashes.py: Drop the broken and obsolete test_local_python() test. Instead, add two tests which check proper logging.
  • launchpad.py: Fix urlopen() for Python3. Thanks Steve Langasek.
  • test/run: Run the tests under LC_MESSAGES=C, to avoid failing tests on translated strings.

2.2.2 (2012-06-13):

Improvements:

  • testsuite: Run with Python 3 by default. To test with Python 2, run "PYTHON=python2 test/run".

Bug fixes:

  • apport: Redefine sys.std{out,err} when redirecting output, as they are None in Python 3 when being called from the kernel.
  • test/test_signal_crashes.py: Clean up unexpected core dumps on failed test cases.
  • apport-gtk: Fix crash when closing the crash dialog while the information is being collected.
  • hookutils.py, xsession_errors(): Fix crash when running under a non-UTF8 locale.
  • data/apport: Do not use sys.stdin.fileno(), it is invalid when being called from the kernel with Python 3.
  • data/apport: When core dumps are enabled, read them from the written report instead of directly from stdin (and then reading the written core file into the .crash report). If the core file size is limited, we otherwise stop reading the core dump from the kernel in the middle and have no (or a broken) core dump to be put into the report.
  • data/apport: Properly close the written crash report before changing its permissions to be readable. This prevents having crash reporting UI from looking at incomplete .crash files.

2.2.1 (2012-06-11)

Bug fixes:

  • apport-cli: Port to work with Python 3.
  • setup.py: When fixing hashbang lines of installed scripts, only include the major Python version.
  • hookutils.py, read_file, attach_file(), attach_file_if_exists(): Convert file contents to unicode if the contents is UTF-8, or the newly added force_unicode argument is True.
  • hooktuils, command_output(): Convert output to unicode by default, and add a "decode_utf8" parameter to disable this.
  • hookutils.py, recent_logfile(): Fix fd leak.
  • data/apport: Do not assume that sys.stdout and sys.stderr always have a name; they can be None in Python 3.
  • data/dump_acpi_tables.py: Fix for Python 3.

2.2 (2012-06-11)

Improvements:

  • Clean up module imports.
  • test/run: Run pyflakes, if available.
  • package_hook: Add --tags option. Thanks to Brian Murray.
  • launchpad.py: Drop the external multipartpost_handler.py (which is not portable to Python 3) and replace it with using the standard email module.
  • launchpad.py: Also work with Python 3. Deal gracefully with a missing "launchpadlib" module; this is not yet available for Python 3, but not required for client-side reporting.
  • apport-kde: Port to work with Python 3.

Bug fixes:

  • apport-retrace: Fix crash when using the --procmaps option.
  • setup.py: Update hashbang lines of installed scripts in data directory to the python executable setup.py was run with, similar to what already happens to scripts installed to ../bin/.

2.1.1 (2012-05-30)

Improvements:

  • launchpad.py: When closing a bug as a duplicate, copy some well-known tags to the master bug. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • launchpad.py: Set importance of Python crash reports to "Medium" by default, similar to signal crashes. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • hookutils.py: Add attach_default_grub() convenience function from the grub2 package hook so it can be used by other packages. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • launchpad.py: Make Launchpad bug subscription user/team configurable: The initial subscriber after filing a bug can be set with the "initial_subscriber" crashdb option, and the team which gets subscribed after retracing with "triaging_team". (LP: #980726)

Bug fixes:

  • report.py: Do not change the SourcePackage: field if the binary package is not installed and does not exist. This fixes source package hooks to actually work in some cases where source and binary package names overlap. (part of LP: #993810)
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: Avoid collecting information twice in "bug update" mode. This caused a crash in cases where the source package in a bug report does not correspond to an installed binary package. (LP: #993810)

2.1 (2012-05-18)

Improvements:

  • packaging.py, install_packages(): Add permanent_rootdir flag and if set, only unpack newly downloaded packages. Implement it for the apt/dpkg backend. Thanks Evan Dandrea.
  • apport-retrace: Add --sandbox-dir option for keeping a permanent sandbox (unpacked packages). This provides a considerable speedup. Thanks Evan Dandrea.
  • crash-digger: Add --sandbox-dir option and pass it to apport-retrace.
  • Fix the whole code to be PEP-8 compatible, and enforce this in test/run by running the "pep8" tool.
  • GTK UI tests: Ensure that there are no GLib/GTK warnings or criticals.
  • Support Python 3. Everything except the launchpad crashdb backend now works with both Python 2 and 3. An important change is that the load(), write(), and write_mime() methods of a ProblemReport and apport.Report object now require the file stream to be opened in binary mode.
  • data/apport: Ignore a crash if the executable was modified after the process started. This often happens if the package is upgraded and a long-running process is not stopped before. (LP: #984944)
  • Add test cases for apport-unpack.
  • apport-retrace: Add information about outdated packages to the "RetraceOutdatedPackages" field.
  • ui.py: Drop python-xdg dependency, use ConfigParser to read the .desktop files.

Bug fixes:

  • apport-gtk: Work around GTK crash when trying to set pixmap on an already destroyed parent window. (LP: #938090)
  • data/dump_acpi_tables.py: Fix crash on undefined variable with non-standard tables. (LP: #982267)
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix crash if a package is installed, but has no candidates in apt. (LP: #980094)
  • data/general-hooks/generic.py: Bump minimum free space requirement from 10 to 50 MB. 10 is not nearly enough particularly for /tmp. (LP: #979928)
  • hookutils.py, recent_logfile(): Use a default limit of 10000 lines and call "tail" instead of reading the whole file. This protects against using up all memory when there are massive repeated log messages. (LP: #984256)
  • apport-gtk: Do not assume that an icon requested for size 42 actually delivers size 42; some themes do not have this available and deliver a smaller one instead, causing overflows. Also, copy the image as gtk_icon_theme_load_icon() returns a readonly result which we must not modify. (LP: #937249)
  • ui.py: Don't show the duplicate warning when the crash database does not accept the problem type, and they are just being sent to whoopsie. Thanks Evan Dandrea. (LP: #989779)
  • report.py: Correctly escape the file path passed to gdb.
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: Do not show the information collection progress dialog if the crash database does not accept this kind of report. In that case whoopsie will upload it in the background and the dialog is not necessary. (LP: #989698)

2.0.1 (2012-04-10)

Bug fixes:

  • test_ui_gtk.py: Disable package hooks for the tests, as they might ask for sudo passwords and other interactive bits, and thus make the tests hang.
  • test_backend_apt_dpkg.py: Fix checks for the installation of -dbgsym packages. This should always happen, as the sandboxes have a ddeb apt source. Only make it conditional on the system apt sources in the "use system config" test.
  • test_report.py: Sleep a bit after calling our test crash script, to ensure the kernel has time to finish writing the core file.
  • generic package hook: Also check /tmp for enough space. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #972933)
  • problem_report.py, write_mime(): Fix regression from version 1.95: Add a value as attachment if it is bigger than 1000 bytes, not if it is bigger than 100. (LP: #977882)

Improvements:

  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Avoid constructing and updating the apt.Cache() objects multiple times, to speed up retracing. Thanks Evan Dandrea. (LP: #973494)

2.0 (2012-03-30)

This is the final 2.0 release, featuring the overhauled and simplified GUI, support for whoopsie-daemon, and client-side duplicate checking.

Bug fixes:

  • report.py, anonymize(): Only replace whole words, not substrings. (LP: #966562)
  • apport_python_hook.py: Fix filtering of org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply exceptions. (LP: #958575)
  • crashdb.py: When publishing the crash database, cut hash file names after quoting, to avoid that the quoting causes them to become too long. (LP: #968070) This also uncovered that known() did not actually find any signature which contained an URL-quoted character, therefore breaking client-side duplicate checking in a lot of cases. Double-quote the file name now, as urlopen() unquotes it.
  • Add a new crash database option "problem_types" and a CrashDatabase method "accepts(report)". This can be used to stop uploading particular problem report types to that database. E. g. a distribution might decide to not get "Crash" reports any more after release. Document the new option in doc/crashdb-conf.txt.
  • ui.py: Do not upload a report if the crash database does not accept the report's type. This behaviour is not really correct, but necessary as long as we only support a single crashdb and have whoopsie hardcoded. Once we have multiple crash dbs, we need to not even present the data if none of the DBs wants the report. See LP: #957177 for details. (LP: #968121)
  • ui.py: Do not short-circuit information collection if report already has a "DistroRelease" field, as the GUIs add that in some cases. Check for "Dependencies" instead. This fixes information collection for kernel problems (which now has a full GTK GUI test case). (LP: #968488)

1.95 (2012-03-22)

Bug fixes:

  • ui.py: Ensure that the report file is readable by the crash reporting daemon after running through collect_info(). Thanks Evan Dandrea.
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: Set the window title to the distribution name, as per http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#error . Thanks Evan Dandrea. (LP: #948015)
  • test/run: Ignore obsolete packages on the system, to avoid breaking the GUI tests due to them.
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: When reporting a "system crash", don't say "... of this program version", but "...of this type", as we don't show a program version in the initial dialog (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker#error) (LP: #961065)
  • problem_report.py, write_mime(): Do not put a key inline if it is bigger than 1 kB, to guard against very long lines. (LP: #957326)
  • etc/cron.daily/apport: Do not remove whoopsie's .upload stamps every day, only if they are older than a week. whoopsie comes with its own cron job which deals with them. Thanks Steve Langasek. (LP: #957102)
  • report.py, mark_ignore(): Fix crash if executable went away underneath us. (LP: #961410)
  • apport-gtk: Do not compare current continue button label against a translated string. Instead just remember whether or not we can restart the application. (LP: #960439)
  • hookutils.py, command_output(): Add option to keep the locale instead of disabling it.
  • hookutils.py, command_output(): Actually make the "input" parameter work, instead of causing an eternal hang. Add tests for all possible modes of operation.
  • hooktuils.py: Change root_command_output() and attach_root_command_outputs() to disable translated messages (LC_MESSAGES=C) only as part of the command to be run, not already for the root prefix command. This will keep the latter (gksu, kdesudo, etc.) translated. (LP: #961659)
  • apport-gtk: Cut off text values after 4000 characters, as Gtk's TreeView does not get along well with huge values. KDE's copes fine, so continue to display the complete value there. (LP: #957062)
  • apport-gtk: Make details window resizable in bug reporting mode.
  • crashdb.py, known(): Check the address signature duplicate database if the symbolic signature exists, but did not find any result. (LP: #103083)
  • ui.py: Run anonymization after checking for duplicates, to prevent host or user names which look like hex numbers to corrupt the stack trace. (LP: #953104)
  • apport-gtk: Require an application to both have TERM and SHELL in its environment to consider it a command line application that was started by the user. (LP: #962130)
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py, _check_files_md5(): Fix double encoding, which caused UnicodeDecodeErrors on non-ASCII characters in an md5sum file. (LP: #953682)
  • apport-kde, apport-gtk: Only show "Relaunch" if the report has a ProcCmdline, otherwise we cannot restart it. (LP: #956173)

Improvements:

  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Add the full "pacmd list" output instead of just sinks and sources. Thanks David Henningsson.
  • apport-gtk, apport-kde: Show the ExecutablePath while we're collecting data for the crash report. Thanks Evan Dandrea. (LP: #938707).

1.94.1 (2012-03-07)

Bug fixes:

  • test_ui_kde.py: Re-enable inadvertently disabled "bug report for uninstalled package" test.
  • ui.py, collect_info(): Do not assume that reports have a "ProblemType" field. This is not the case when updating a bug. (LP: #947519)
  • apport-cli: Consistently handle unicode vs. byte arrays. (LP: #946207)
  • report.py, anonymize(): Fix crash when the hostname or user name contain non-ASCII characters. (LP: #945230)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix UnicodeDecodeError on unexpected md5sum output. (LP: #921037)
  • apport-gtk: Fix handling of non-ASCII strings in message dialogs. (LP: #865394)

1.94 (2012-03-02)

Bug fixes:

  • apport: Set the group of written reports to "whoopsie" if that group exists.
  • Fix tests to run properly against the system-installed modules and binaries.
  • test/run: Run under LC_MESSAGES=C to avoid test failures due to translated strings.
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Also attach xsession-errors for programs that link to libgtk-3.
  • launchpad.py: Properly handle "Expired" status, to avoid marking new bugs as duplicates of expired ones. (LP: #941854)
  • apport: Fix crash if the "whoopsie" group does not exist. (LP: #942326)
  • report.py, crash_signature(): Do not put "" frames into Python crash signatures that happen outside of function/method calls. Fall back to the file/line number as a frame description instead. This will do a much better job at disambiguating e. g. different ImportError crashes. (LP: #920403)
  • Make "binary changed since the time of the crash" error message more comprehensible, thanks Paolo Rotolo. (LP: #942830)
  • crashdb.py, check_duplicate(): It can happen that a bug gets identified as being a duplicate of bug S by symbolic signatures and a duplicate of bug A by address signatures. Empirical evidence shows that this is due to the unavoidable jitter in stack traces (A and S not being identified as duplicates as their signatures differ slightly) and not a logic error. So instead of erroring out, duplicate all three bugs and keep the lowest number as the master ID. (LP: #943117)
  • Revert the usage of multiple nested threads during data collection, and switch back to only using one UI thread. The UI implementations can, and now do, decide between showing a spinner and showing a progress dialog in the ui_*_info_collection_progress() methods. This fixes libX11 crashes when multiple UI threads do changes concurrently (LP: #901675), and also avoids multi-thread induced crashes in Pango (LP: #943661). The removal of the collect() method also fixes the new crashes in it. (LP: #942098, #939803)
  • ui.py, get_desktop_entry(): Fix crash on uninstalled package. (LP: #940984)
  • data/unkillable_shutdown: Fix crash on race condition when PID goes away while the report is created. (LP: #546369)
  • apport/hookutils.py, pci_devices(): Fix crash on unexpected lines from lspci. (LP: #904489)
  • Drop hardcoded "Ubuntu" words again which crept in with the whoopsie support merge. Use the DistroRelease: field.
  • apport-kde: Fix Home page URL in KApplication metadata.
  • apport-gtk: Fix resizability and size after hiding details. (LP: #405418)

Improvements:

  • test/run: Drop "local" argument. This now tests against the source tree when run in the source tree root, and against the system libraries/programs when run from anywhere else.
  • test/run: Consider command line arguments as test names and only run those when given. Also support just running a single test.
  • testsuite: Force the skipping of online tests when $SKIP_ONLINE_TESTS is set.
  • hookutils.py, xsession_errors(): Add a reasonable default pattern which matches glib-style warnings, errors, criticals etc. and X window errors. In data/general-hooks/generic.py, call it with that default instead of the rather incomplete custom pattern. (LP: #932660)
  • packaging.py: Add get_package_origin() method, and implement it for apt-dpkg.
  • report.py, add_package_info(): Add "[origin: ...]" tag to "Package" and "Dependencies" fields for any package which is not native to the distribution. If any such package is present, tag the report with "third-party-packages" in data/general-hooks/generic.py. (LP: #927912)
  • apport/packaging.py: Add get_uninstalled_package() method as a helper method for the test suite. Use it instead of a hardcoded Debian/Ubuntu specific name in test/test_hooks.py.
  • test/test_ui_{gtk,kde}.py: Add test cases for complete UI workflow runs for reporting a bug against an installed/uninstalled package, and reporting a crash with and without showing details. This reproduces the recent crashes like LP: #901675 or LP: #943661.
  • test_ui.py: Add a test case for reporting a complete report on uninstalled package. This happens when reporting a problem from a different machine through copying a .crash file.
  • test/run: Add a test that there are no hardcoded "Ubuntu" words in the source. The code should use the DistroRelease: field or lsb_release.

1.93 (2012-02-23):

Bug fixes:

  • apport-gtk: Fix crash on nonexisting icon. Thanks Evan Dandrea. (LP: #937354)
  • ui.py, open_url(): Revert back to calling sudo instead of dropping privileges ourselves; with the latter, calling firefox as the sudo'ing user fails. (LP: #916810, #938128)
  • ui.py: Fix aborting with "AssertionError" if the report is already known, but without an URL. (LP: #938778)
  • launchpad.py: If a bug is already known, but the report is private, do not send the report. There is little sense piling up lots of duplicates. (LP: #938700)
  • test/crash: Fix regression of test_crash_apport(), consider $TERM a non-sensitive variable.
  • ui.py: Fix test failures for data collection progress, they are not expected to happen for "ProblemType: Crash" any more (happens in the background during sending, or if user clicks on "Show Details").
  • test/hooks: Use a package from Debian/Ubuntu main, so that this works better during package builds on build servers.
  • test/python: Do not assume that /var/crash/ exists. Use /var/tmp/ for the fake binaries instead.
  • data/general-hooks/parse_segv.py: Fix test case name.
  • ui.py: Fix crash on invalid core dumps. (LP: #937215)
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash on unicode report titles. (LP: #896626)

Improvements:

  • apport-gtk: Show the most interesting fields first in the details view.
  • do-release: Call pyflakes and abort on errors other than unused imports.
  • Move all test suites out of the code modules into test/test_.py. This avoids having to load it every time the program runs, and also allows running the tests against the installed version of Apport.
  • Clean up the other executable test script in test/* and change them to the same structure as the module tests.

1.92 (2012-02-20):

Bug fixes:

  • ui.py: Fix wrong creation of "~" folder instead of expanding it to home directory when using "Examine locally". Thanks Jason Conti! (LP: #909149)
  • Replace file() calls with open() for Python 3 compatibility. Thanks Colin Watson!
  • launchpad.py: Avoid sending tag names with upper case. (LP: #924181)
  • report.py, crash_signature_addresses(): Fix crash if report does not have "Signal".
  • apport-gtk: Fix resize handling of expander in details window. Thanks Thomas Bechtold! (LP: #930562)
  • Clean up unnecessary imports. Thanks Evan Dandrea!

Improvements:

  • man/apport-bug.1: Mention where crash files are stored. Thanks David Kastrup.
  • hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Sort ProcModules, thanks Brian Murray.
  • launchpad.py: Keep "Dependencies" attachment in duplicates. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • Reorganize the GNOME and KDE user interface to do the crash notifications and detail browser in a single dialog. Add test/gtk and test/kde tests to check expected dialog layout for different cases. Thanks Evan Dandrea!
  • Add support for the whoopsie-daisy crash reporting daemon by creating zero-byte .upload file stamps for crash reports. Thanks Evan Dandrea!

1.91 (2012-01-18):

Bug fixes:

  • crashdb.py, check_duplicate(): If a crash has a signature but no existing duplicate in the DB, also check for an existing address signature duplicate in the DB.
  • apport-retrace: Use DistroRelease specific subdirectory of the cache dir for mapping a file to a package, as these maps are release specific.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Refresh Contents.gz cache if it is older than one day.
  • crashdb.py: Ensure that address_signature duplicate db table does not have multiple identical signatures by making it a primary key. Bump the db format to "3". Existing databases need to be migrated manually as SQLite does not allow adding a "PRIMARY KEY" constraint to existing tables.
  • crashdb.py: Do not add a new address signature entry if one already exists.
  • apport-cli: Fix UnicodeDecodeError on unicode report values. (LP: #275972)
  • launchpad.py: Only set bug task importance if it is undecided.
  • apport-retrace: Fix "an useful" typo. (LP: #911437)
  • report.py: Filter out frames which are internal kernel/glibc implementation details and not stable across duplicates. In particular, filter out __kernel-syscall() and the SSE stubs.
  • crashdb.py: Remove debugging leftover which completely disabled bug pattern checking.
  • report.py: Update reading AssertionMessage. Current (e)glibc turned __abort_msg from a simple static string into a struct.

Improvements:

  • Change permissions of .crash files from 0600 to 0640, so that /var/crash can be made g+s and crash handling daemons can access those.
  • Python exceptions: Ignore DBus.Error.NoReply. It does not help to get these traces from the client-side application, you need the actual exception in the D-Bus server backend instead. (LP: #914220)
  • Support /etc/apport/whitelist.d/ similarly to /etc/apport/blacklist.d/, for cases like installer environments where only crashes of a few selected programs should be reported.

1.90 (2011-11-24):

First beta release of 2.0 which introduces client-side duplicate checking.

Bug fixes:

  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix another test case failure when ddeb repository is not enabled.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix handling of explicit cache directory name when it is a relative path.
  • launchpad.py: Only query for bugs after 2011-08-01, to avoid timeouts.
  • ui.py: Also anonymize standard bug title. (LP: #893863)
  • launchpad.py: Current Launchpad cannot have private bugs which affect multiple projects. Fix test suite accordingly.

Improvements:

  • report.py: Break out new method stacktrace_top_function() from standard_title(), so that other parts of the code can use this as well.
  • launchpad.net: When sending retraced results back to the bug report, update the topmost function in the bug title. (LP: #869970)
  • report.py, add_gdb_info(): Add a new field "StacktraceAddressSignature" which is a heuristic signature for signal crashes. This should be used if crash_signature() fails, i. e. the Stacktrace field does not have enough symbols. This can be used to check for duplicates on the client side, provided that the crash database server supports querying for these. Do not expose this field when uploading to crash databases though, as it can be recomputed from the already existing information (ProcMaps and Stacktrace) and thus would just clutter the reports.
  • crashdb.py: Add a table "version" with the database format version. Add automatic upgrading to the most current format.
  • crashdb.py: Put address signatures from reports checked with check_duplicate() into the duplicate database, so that implementations of known() can check for these.
  • dupdb-admin: Add "publish" dupdb-admin command which exports the duplicate database into a set of text files suitable for WWW publishing.
  • crashdb.py: Add new method "known(report)" which can be implemented to check if the crash db already knows about the crash signature. If so, the report will not be uploaded, and instead the user will be directed to the existing report URL (if available), similar to bug patterns. The default implementation checks this format, if the crash database is initialized with a "dupdb_url" option pointing to the exported database.
  • launchpad.py: Override known() to check if the master bug is actually accessible by the reporter, and is not tagged with "apport-failed-retrace" or "apport-request-retrace"; otherwise file it anyway.
  • crash-digger: Add --publish-db option to conveniently integrate duplicate DB publication (similar to dupdb-admin publish) into retracer setups.
  • launchpad.py: Attach updated stack traces from a duplicate to the master bug if it failed retracing previously or has an "apport-request-retrace" tag. (LP: #869982)
  • apport-kde, apport-gtk: Support the "Annotation" field for custom dialog titles for "Crash" and "Package" problem types as well, not just for "Kernel". (LP: #664378)

1.26 (2011-11-11):

Bug fixes:

  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Port to current python-apt API.
  • hookutils.py: Fix path_to_key() to also work with unicode arguments.
  • test/crash: Exit successfully if apport is not enabled in the system. This allows packages to run the test suite during build.
  • report.py, add_proc_info(): Correctly handle "python -m " programs as being interpreted and determine the appropriate module path.
  • Fix some import statements to also work for the system-installed test suite.
  • test/run: Fix testing data/general-hooks/parse_segv.py when called in system-installed mode.
  • apport/ui.py: Clean up test .crash file after test cases.
  • Fix tests when running as root.
  • setup.py: Fix crash when "javac -version" fails.
  • README: Update command for one-time enablement.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix interleaving usage of install_packages() with other operations such as get_version(), by resetting the apt status after building and using the sandbox.
  • report.py test suite: Remove requirement that $USER is set, which makes it easier to run this from package build environments.
  • apport/ui.py, test/crash: Use "yes" as test process instead of "cat". The former is less likely to run already, and does not depend on having a stdin, so it runs better in test environments like autopkgtest.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix tests if system does not have a dbgsym apt source.

Improvements:

  • Ignore a crash if gnome-session is running and says that the session is being shut down. These often die because X.org or other services are going away, are usually harmless, and just cause a lot of clutter in bug trackers. (LP: #460932)
  • test/crash: Rewrite using Python's unittest, to be in line with other tests, and be easier to maintain and extend.

1.25 (2011-11-02):

Improvements:

  • Add new response "Examine locally" to presenting the report details, which runs apport-retrace in the chosen mode in a terminal. This should be made available for crash reports if apport-retrace and a Terminal application are installed; add an abstrace UI method for this. (LP: #75901)
  • apport-gtk: Add "Examine locally..." button, and implement ui_run_terminal().
  • apport-cli: Add "Examine locally..." responses, and implement ui_run_terminal().
  • apport-cli: Greatly speed up displaying large reports. This also changes the format to avoid indenting each line with a space, and visually set apart the keys in a better way.
  • apport_python_hook.py: Move tests out of this file into test/python, to avoid having to parse the unit tests at each Python startup.
  • test/python: Also make tests work if Python hook is not installed in system's sitecustomize.py.
  • packaging.py: Add get_modified_conffiles() API, and implement it in packaging-apt-dpkg.py.
  • hookutils.py: Add attach_conffiles().
  • hookutils.py: Add attach_upstart_overrides().

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Remove "Ubuntu" in bug response, replace with "this software". (LP: #883234)
  • apport-kde: Rearrange order of imports to get intended error message if PyKDE is not installed.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Ignore hardening-wrapper diversions, to make gcc_ice_hook work if hardening-wrapper is installed.
  • apport_python_hook: Respect $APPORT_REPORT_DIR.
  • apport_python_hook: Limit successive crashes per program and user to 3 per day, just like signal crashes. (LP: #603503)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Skip online tests when there is no default route.
  • ui.py: Fix test suite to not fail if system has some obsolete or non-distro packages.

1.24 (2011-10-19):

Bug fixes:

  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py, install_packages(): Also copy apt/sources.list.d/ into sandbox.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py, install_packages(): Install apt keyrings from config dir or from system into sandbox. (LP: #856216)
  • packaging.py, backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Define that install_packages() should return a SystemError for broken configs/unreachable servers etc., and fix the apt/dpkg implementation accordingly.
  • apport-retrace: Don't crash, just give a proper error message if servers are unreachable, or configuration files are broken. (LP: #859248)
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix crash when /etc/apport/native-origins.d contains any files. (LP: #865199)
  • hookutils, recent_logfile(): Fix invalid return value if log file is not readable. (LP: #819357)
  • test/crash: Fix race condition in the "second instance terminates immediately" check.
  • hookutils.py: Replace attach_gconf() with a no-op stub. It used static python modules like "gconf" which broke the PyGI GTK user interface, and gconf is rather obsolete these days.
  • ui.py, open_url(): Greatly simply and robustify by just using xdg-open. This already does the right thing wrt. reading the default browser from GNOME, KDE, XCE, and other desktops. (LP: #198449)
  • data/general-hooks/generic.py: Only attach ~/.xsession_errors if the bug is reported in the same XDG session as the crash happened. (LP: #869974)
  • Ignore crashes for programs which got updated in between the crash and reporting. (LP: #132904)
  • Special-case crashes of 'twistd': Try to determine the client program and assign the report to that, or fail with an UnreportableReason. (LP: #755025)
  • apport-gtk: In bug update mode, make details dialog resizable and fix default size. (LP: #865754)
  • apport-gtk: Fix crash if report does not have ProcCmdline. (LP: #854452)
  • hookutils.py, attach_wifi(): Anonymize ESSID and AP MAC from "iwconfig" output. (LP: #746900)
  • test/crash: Fix test failure if user is not in any system groups.
  • test/crash: Change to /tmp/ for test crash process, to fix failure if the user that runs the test suite cannot write into the current directory. (LP: #868695)
  • ui.py: Improve error message if package is not a genuine distro package. Thanks to Ronan Jouchet. (LP: #559345)

Improvements:

  • apport-retrace: Add --timestamp option to prepend a timestamp to log messages. This is useful for batch operations.
  • crash-digger: Call apport-retrace with --timestamps, to get consistent timestamps in log output.
  • hookutils.py: Add two new functions attach_gsettings_package() and attach_gsettings_schema() for adding user-modified gsettings keys to a report. (LP: #836489)
  • hookutils.py: Add new function in_session_of_problem() which returns whether the given report happened in the currently running XDG session. This can be used to determine if e. g. ~/.xsession-errors is relevant and should be attached.

1.23.1 (2011-09-29)

Bug fixes:

  • apport/crashdb.py: Ensure that duplicate table only has one entry per report ID.
  • apport-retrace: Pass correct executable path to gdb in --gdb with --sandbox mode.
  • apport-retrace: Do not leave behind temporary directories on errors.
  • apport-retrace: Drop assertion failure for existence of "Stacktrace". This isn't present in the case of gdb crashing, and there is not much we can do about it. This should not break the retracer.
  • apport/report.py: Unwind XError() from stack traces for the "StacktraceTop" field, as they take a significant part of the trace. This causes bugs to be duplicated which really have different causes.

1.23 (2011-09-14)

Improvements:

  • crashdb.py, crash-digger, dupdb-admin: Drop the concept of "duplicate DB consolidation". Such massive queries cause timeouts with e. g. Launchpad. Instead, update the status of potential master bugs in the crash DB whenever check_duplicate() is called.

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Fix crash in close_duplicate() if master bug was already marked as a duplicate of the examined bug.
  • problem_report.py, load(): Fix missing last character if the last line in a multi-line field is not terminated with a newline.
  • launchpad.py: Fix test_marking_python_task_mangle() check to work with current Launchpad.
  • apport-retrace: If the user did not specify a --cache directory, create a shared one instead of letting the two install_packages() calls create their own. This ensures that the apt and dpkg status is up to date, and avoids downloading the package indexes multiple times. (LP: #847951)
  • apport-retrace: Give proper error message instead of AssertionError crash if a report does not contain standard Apport format data. (LP: #843221)
  • fileutils.py, get_new_reports(): Fix crash if report file disappears in the middle of the operation. (LP: #640216)
  • apport/ui.py, load_report(): Intercept another case of broken report files. (LP: #445142)
  • apport/report.py, standard_title(): Escape regular expression control characters in custom exception names. (LP: #762998)

1.22.1 (2011-09-06)

Improvements:

  • dupdb-admin: Add "removeid" command.

Bug fixes:

  • dupdb-admin: Use the in-memory CrashDB implementation for simple operations like dump or changeid, which do not require an actual backend. This makes the command work in checkouts without a /etc/apport/crashdb.conf.
  • dupdb-admin: Fix UnicodeEncodeError crash.
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash if a crash report does not have a DistroRelease.
  • Set the default "Apport" title for choice dialogs instead of the default apport-gtk title. Thanks Robert Roth. (LP: #608222)
  • apport-gtk: Update markup_escape_text() call to current glib. (LP: #829635)

1.22 (2011-08-25)

Improvements:

  • Completely rework apport-retrace to use gdb's "debug-file-directory" and "solib-absolute-prefix" settings and only unpack the necessary packages in a temporary directory. This makes it possible to use it in a running system without actually touching installed packages, does not need any root privileges, and stops the requirement of using chroots with fakechroot and fakeroot. This is a lot easier to maintain and use, and a lot faster, too. As a consequence, drop the chroot module, and update crash-digger accordingly. See "man apport-retrace" for the new usage. It is now also easier to port to other packaging backends, as a lot of the common logic moved out of the packaging API; packaging.install_retracing_packages() got dropped in favor of the simpler packaging.install_packages().
  • crash-digger: Show how many bugs are left in the pool with each new retrace.

Bug fixes:

  • apport-gtk: Fix crash in GLib.markup_escape_text() call, regression from 1.21.3. (LP: #828010)
  • launchpad.py: When searchTasks() times out, exit with 99 as this is a transient error.
  • crash-digger: Intercept OverflowError from downloaded compressed attachments.

1.21.3 (2011-08-17)

Bug fixes:

  • gtk/apport-gtk.desktop.in: Also show in Unity. (LP: #803519)
  • apport-unpack: Fix crash on file errors.
  • Add apport.packaging.get_library_paths() interface and implement it for backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py using dpkg multiarch directories. Use it in chroot.py.
  • hookutils.py: Don't attach empty values. Thanks Bryce Harrington. (LP: #813798)
  • apport-gtk: Correctly pass message dialog type.
  • apport-gtk: Fix GLib and GObject imports to be compatible with the future pygobject 3.0.

Improvements:

  • hookutils.py: Add attach_mac_events() for reporting logs of MAC systems. Looks for AppArmor messages for now. Thanks Marc Deslauriers!
  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Get a list of outputs/inputs that PulseAudio knows about, which also shows the currently selected output/input, as well as volumes. This should help with "no sound" bug troubleshooting. Thanks Luke Yelavich.

1.21.2 (2011-07-01)

Improvements:

  • test/run: Check $PYTHON for using a different Python interpreter (such as "python3") for the tests.
  • generic hook: Don't report package installation failures due to segfaulting maintainer scripts. We want the actual crash report only. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • hookutils.py, attach_wifi(): Also include wpasupplicant logs. Thanks Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre!

Bug fixes:

  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix crash introduced in 1.21.1's multiarch fixes.
  • report.py: Fix bug patterns to correctly match against compressed report fields.

1.21.1 (2011-06-20)

Improvements:

  • data/general-hooks/generic.py: Also check for low space on /var. Thanks Brian Murray.
  • hookutils.py, attach_file() and attach_file_if_exists(): Add a new "overwrite" flag option. If not given, now default to overwriting an existing key, as this is usually what you need when attaching files (instead of attaching it several times with '_' appended to the keys). You can get the old behaviour by setting overwrite=False.

Bug fixes:

  • When showing the size of the full report, take the compressed size of binary values instead of their uncompressed size, as the crash db upload will use the compressed values.
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix for current dpkg with multiarch support.
  • test/run: Fix the test suite to run against the system installed libraries with current Python versions (2.6, 2.7) where file does not work any more with imports.

1.21 (2011-06-08)

Improvements:

  • Supply --desktop option to kdesudo to improve the description which program is requesting administrative privileges.
  • apport-checkreports: Exit with status 2 if there are new reports, but apport is disabled. This helps crash notification GUIs to not display new crash reports in that case. Thanks to Michael Vogt for the original patch.
  • Add data/is-enabled: Shell script to check if apport is enabled. Non-Python programs (which can't use apport.packaging.enabled() ) can call this instead of having to parse /etc/default/apport themselves, and just check the exit code. Inspired by original patch from Michael Vogt, thanks!

Bug fixes:

  • apport-gtk: HTML-escape text for dialogs with URLs. (LP: #750870)
  • dump_acpi_tables.py: Check to see if acpi/tables dir is mounted first. Thanks Brian Murray. (LP: #729622)
  • man/apport-cli.1: Document recently added -w/--window option. Thanks Abhinav Upadhyay! (LP: #765600)
  • Use kde-open instead of kfmclient to open URLs under KDE. Thanks Philip Muškovac. (LP: #765808)

1.20.1 (2011-03-31)

Bug fixes:

  • Add bash completion support for new -w/--window option that was introduced in 1.20. Thanks Philip Muškovac.
  • apport-unpack: Fix crash if target directory already exists.
  • Fix crash if UnreportableReason is a non-ASCII string. (LP: #738632)
  • Fix crash if application from desktop name is a non-ASCII string. (LP: #737799)
  • unkillable_shutdown: Fix rare crash if ExecutablePath does not exist (any more). (LP: #537904)
  • kernel_crashdump: Fix crash if the vmcore file disappeared underneath us. (LP: #450295)
  • unkillable_shutdown: Fix crash if the checked process terminated underneath us. (LP: #540436)
  • ui.py: Properly raise exceptions from the upload thread that happen at its very end. (LP: #469943)

1.20 (2011-03-17)

Improvements:

  • Add support for -w/--window option which will enable user to select a window as a target for filing a problem report. Thanks Abhinav Upadhyay for the patch! (LP: #357847)
  • Disable the filtering on SIGABRT without assertion messages. Turns out that developers want these crash reports after all. (LP: #729223)
  • Add support for a "DuplicateSignature" report fields. This allows package hooks to implement custom duplicate problem handling which doesn't need to be hardcoded in Apport itself. Update the launchpad backend to tag such bugs as "need-duplicate-check".

Bug fixes:

  • report.py, add_hooks_info(): Properly report TypeErrors from hooks.
  • apport-retrace: Intercept SystemErrors from ill-formed gzip attachments as well.
  • Fix crash if crash database configuration does not specify a bug_pattern_url. Just assume None. (LP: #731526)
  • If a custom crash database does not specify a bug_pattern_url, fall back to using the default database's. (LP: #731526)
  • hookutils.py Update WifiSyslog regex to correctly catch application log messages in syslog. Thanks Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre. (LP: #732917)
  • hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Avoid error message if machine does not have a PCI bus. Thanks Marcin Juszkiewicz! (LP: #608449)
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Replace deprecated getChanges() call with get_changes().
  • apport-gtk: Fix broken dialog heading if the name of the crashed program contains an & or other markup specific characters.
  • apport-gtk: Don't crash if GTK cannot be initialized. This usually happens without a $DISPLAY or when the session is being shut down. Just print an error message. If there are pending crashes, they will be shown again the next time a session starts. (LP: #730569)

1.19 (2011-02-28)

Bug fixes:

  • Update stack unwind patterns for current glib (slightly changed function names), and also ignore a preceding '*'. (LP: #716251)
  • Fix crash_signature() to fail if there is an empty or too short StacktraceTop.
  • apt backend: Do not generate a warning if the opportunistically added -dbg package does not exist.
  • apt backend: Only add -dbg in --no-pkg mode, as there will be conflicts in normal package mode.
  • apt backend: Call tar with target cwd instead of using -C; the latter causes an extra openat() call which breaks with current fakechroot.
  • launchpad.py: Fix retracer crash if DistroRelease field does not exist.
  • Convert deprecated failIf()/assert_() TestCase method calls to assertFalse()/assertTrue().

Improvements:

  • In apport-bug, if the user specifies a PID referring to a kernel thread, do the right thing and file the bug against the kernel
  • In hookutils.attach_dmesg, skip over an initial truncated message if one is present (this happens when the ring buffer overflows)
  • Change bug patterns to just use one central file instead of per-package files. This allows bug patterns to be written which are not package specific, and is easier to maintain as well. IMPORTANT: This changed the format of crashdb.conf: bug_pattern_base is now obsolete, and the new attribute bug_pattern_url now points to the full URL/path of the patterns file. Thanks to Matt Zimmerman!

1.18 (2011-02-16)

Bug fixes:

  • Ensure that symptom scripts define a run() function, and don't show them if not.
  • Do not show symptom scripts which start with an underscore. These can be used for private libraries for the actual symptom scripts.
  • Update bash completion. Thanks Philip Muškovac.
  • etc/default/apport: Remove obsolete "maxsize" setting. (LP: #719564)

Improvements:

  • Remove explicit handling of KDE *.ui files in setup.py, as python-distutils-extra 2.24 fixes this. Bump version check.
  • hookutils.py: Add attach_root_command_outputs() to run several commands at once. This avoids asking for the password several times. (LP: #716595)

1.17.2 (2011-02-04)

Improvements:

  • Be more Python 3 compatible (not fully working with Python 3 yet, though).
  • apt/dpkg backend: Drop support for pre-0.7.9 python-apt API.
  • Add --tag option to add extra tags to reports. (LP: #572504)

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py, attach_dmesg(): Do not overwrite already existing dmesg.
  • hookutils.py: Be more robust against file permission errors. (LP: #444678)
  • ui.py: Do not show all the options in --help when invoked as *-bug. (LP: #665953)
  • launchpad.py: Adapt test cases to current standard_title() behaviour.

1.17.1 (2011-01-10)

Bug fixes:

  • Make the GTK frontend work with GTK 2.0 as well, and drop "3.0" requirement.

1.17 (2010-12-31)

Improvements:

  • Better standard bug titles for Python crashes. Thanks Matt Zimmerman! (LP: #681574)
  • Add handler for uncaught Java exceptions. There is no integration for automatically intercepting all Java crashes yet, see java/README. Thanks Matt Zimmerman! (LP: #548877)

Bug fixes:

  • GTK frontend: Require GTK 3.0.
  • launchpad.py: Default to "production" instance, not "edge", since edge is obsolete now.
  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Fix crash if /proc/asound/cards does not exist. (LP: #626215)
  • ui.py, format_filesize(): Fix to work with stricter locale.format() in Python 2.7. (LP: #688535). While we are at it, also change it to use base-10 units.
  • hookutils.py, package_versions(): Always include all requested package names even if they're unknown to us. Thanks Matt Zimmerman! (LP: #695188)
  • launchpad.py: When updating a bug, also add new tags. Thanks Brian Murray!

1.16 (2010-11-19)

New features:

  • Port GTK frontend from pygtk2 to GTK+3.0 and gobject-introspection.

Bug fixes:

  • Fix symptoms again. Version 1.15 broke the default symptom directory.
  • Fix memory test case to work with current Python versions, where the SQLite integrity check throws a different exception.

1.15 (2010-11-11)

New features:

  • Add dump_acpi_tables.py script. This can be called by package hooks which need ACPI table information (in particular, kernel bug reports). Thanks to Brad Figg for the script!
  • Order symptom descriptions alphabetically. Thanks to Javier Collado.
  • Check $APPORT_SYMPTOMS_DIR environment variable for overriding the system default path. Thanks to Javier Collado.

Bug fixes:

  • testsuite: Check that crashdb.conf can have dynamic code to determine DB names and options.
  • ui.py test suite: Rewrite _gen_test_crash() to have the test process core dump itself, instead of using gdb to do it. The latter fails in ptrace restricted environments, such as Ubuntu 10.10.
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix handling of /etc/apport/native-origins.d to actually work. Thanks Steve Langasek. (LP: #627777)
  • apport-kde: Load correct translation catalogue. Thanks Jonathan Riddell. (LP: #633483)
  • launchpad.py: Use launchpadlib to file a bug instead of screen scraping. The latter was completely broken with current Launchpad, so this makes the test suite actually work again. Thanks to Diogo Matsubara!
  • launchpad.py: Change $APPORT_STAGING to $APPORT_LAUNCHPAD_INSTANCE, so that you can now specify "staging", "edge", or "dev" (for a local http://launchpad.dev installation). Thanks to Diogo Matsubara!
  • backends/packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix crash on empty lines in ProcMaps attachment.
  • doc/symptoms.txt: Fix typo, thanks Philip Muskovac. (LP: #590521)
  • apport/hookutils.py: rename ProcCmdLine to ProcKernelCmdLine to not wipe wipe out /proc/$pid/cmdline information. (LP: #657091)
  • apport/hookutils.py: attach_file() will not overwrite existing report keys, instead appending "_" until the key is unique.
  • Fix --save option to recognise ~, thanks Philip Muškovac. (LP: #657278)
  • Remove escalation_subscription from Ubuntu bug DB definition, turned out to not be useful; thanks Brian Murray.
  • launchpad.py: Fix APPORT_LAUNCHPAD_INSTANCE values with a https:// prefix.
  • apt backend: Opportunistically try to install a -dbg package in addition to -dbgsym, to increase the chance that at least one of it exists. Thanks Daniel J Blueman!

1.14.1 (2010-06-24)

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py, attach_drm_info(): Sanitize connector names. Thanks Chris Halse Rogers! (LP: #597558)
  • bash completion: Complete all path names, apport-bug can be invoked with a path to a program. Thanks Philip Muskovac.

1.14 (2010-06-16)

New features:

  • hookutils.py: Add new method attach_drm_info() to read and format /sys/class/drm/*.

Bug fixes:

  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Fix deprecated python-apt variables, thanks David Stansby. (LP: #591695)
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash on attachments which are named *.gz, but uncompressed. (LP: #574360)
  • hookutils.py, attach_gconf(): Fix defaults parsing for boolean keys. (LP: #583109)

1.13.4 (2010-05-04)

  • bash completion: Fix error message if /usr/share/apport/symptoms does not exist. Thanks Philip Muškovac! (LP: #562118)
  • general-hooks/parse_segv.py: Report stack exhaustion more clearly and correctly handle register dereferencing calls.
  • Save/restore environment when calling hooks, in case they change the locale, etc. (LP: #564422)
  • hookutils.py, command_output(): Do not set $LC_MESSAGES for the calling process/hook, just for the command to be called.
  • ui.py: When displaying strings from system exceptions, decode them into an unicode string, to avoid crashing the KDE UI. (LP: #567253)
  • apport-retrace: Fix crash for retracing kernel vmcores, which do not have an ExecutablePath.
  • apport-bug manpage: Clarify when apport-collect may be used. Thanks Brian Murray! (LP: #537273)
  • generic hook: Check ProcMaps for unpackaged libraries, and ask the user if he really wants to continue. If he does, tag the report as "local-libs" and add a "LocalLibraries" field to the report with a list of them. (LP: #545227)

1.13.3 (2010-04-14)

  • data/general-hooks/parse_segv.py: suggest segv-in-kernel possibility.
  • ui.py: When running as root, only show system crash reports, to avoid restarting user programs as root. (LP: #445017)

1.13.2 (2010-03-31)

  • problem_report.py, write_mime(): Add new optional argument "priority_fields" for ordering report keys. Patch by Brian Murray, thanks!
  • launchpad.py: Put some interesting fields first in the report, with the new priority_fields argument. Patch by Brian Murray, thanks!
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py, _install_debug_kernel(): Do not crash on an outdated kernel, just return that it is outdated. (LP: #532923)
  • launchpad.py test suite: Add "Referer" HTTP header, now required by launchpad.
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash if configuration does not have an "escalated_tag" option.
  • launchpad.py: Port to launchpadlib 1.0 API, thanks Michael Bienia for the initial patch! (LP: #545009)
  • gtk/apport-gtk-mime.desktop.in, kde/apport-kde-mime.desktop.in: Change categories so that these do not ever appear in menu editors. (LP: #449215)
  • launchpad.py: Some LP bugs have broken attachments (this is a bug in Launchpad itself). Ignore those instead of crashing.
  • apport-gtk: Turn http:// and https:// links into clickable hyperlinks in information and error dialogs. (LP: #516323)
  • apport-retrace: Fix crash when trying to rebuild package info for reports without an ExecutablePath. (LP: #436157)
  • ui.py: Fix crash when package information cannot be determined due to broken apt status. (LP: #362743)
  • ui.py: Fix crash when /etc/apport/crashdb.conf is damaged; print an appropriate error message instead. (LP: #528327)
  • data/kernel_crashdump: Fix crash if log file disappeared underneath us. (LP: #510327)
  • data/apport: Fix IOError when apport is called with invalid number of arguments, and stderr is not a valid fd. (LP: #467363)
  • hookutils.py: Factor out the DMI collection code from attach_hardware() into attach_dmi(), and call that in attach_alsa() as well. Thanks to Brad Figg for the patch! (LP: #552091)
  • apport/ui.py: Fix the help output if Apport is invoked under an alternative name (like apport-collect). (LP: #539427)

1.13.1 (2010-03-20)

Bug fixes:

  • Update parse-segv to handle gdb 7.1 output.
  • Enhance test suite to work with gdb 7.1 as well, and catch future outputs.
  • UI: Add exception string to the "network error" dialog, to better tell what the problem is.
  • UI: Add back -p option to apport-collect/apport-update-bug (regression from 1.13). (LP: #538944)
  • launchpad.py: Add yet another workaround for LP#336866. (LP: #516381)
  • launchpad.py, download(): Ignore attachments with invalid key names.
  • Fix regression from 1.10 which made it impossible for a package hook to set a third-party crash database for non-native packages. (LP: #517272)
  • apport-cli: Create the 'details' string only if user wants to view details, and do not show files larger than 1MB. Thanks Scott Moser! (LP: #486122)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Silence apt.Cache() spewage to stdout with newer python-apt versions. (LP: #531518)

Improvements:

  • unkillable_shutdown: Add list of running processes and omit PIDs to report. (LP: #537262)
  • Sort the report by key in the details view. (LP: #519416)

1.13 (2010-03-10)

New features:

  • Add "unkillable_shutdown" script to collect information about processes which are still running after sending SIGTERM to them. This can be hooked into e. g. /etc/init.d/sendsigs on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Improvements:

  • apport_python_hook.py: Directly check /etc/default/apport instead of querying packaging.enabled(), to avoid importing lots of modules for non-packaged scripts. Thanks Stuart Colville! (LP: #528355)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix SegV parser to notice walking off the stack during "call" or "ret" (LP: #531672).
  • Fix --help output for bug updating mode (invocation as apport-collect or apport-update-bug). (LP: #504116)
  • Fix bug escalation tagging, thanks to Brian Murray.
  • Fix option processing when being invoked as apport-bug. Thanks to Daniel Hahler for the patch! (LP: #532944)

1.12.1 (2010-02-22)

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Do not keep escalating bugs, just escalate at the 10th duplicate.
  • Improve error message if a symptom script did not determine a package name. (LP: #503834)
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Fix crash on libGL check with empty StacktraceTop.
  • Review and clean up usage of chmod(). This fixes a small race condition in the Python exception hook where a local attacker could read the information from another user's crash report. (LP: #516029)
  • hookutils, package_versions(): Ignore "None" packages, for more robust package hooks. (LP: #518295)

1.12 (2010-01-20)

Improvements:

  • launchpad.py: Add options 'escalation_subscription' and 'escalation_tag' for handling bugs with more than 10 duplicates.
  • crashdb.conf: For Ubuntu, escalate bugs with >= 10 duplicates to "ubuntu-bugcontrol" and tag them with "bugpattern-needed". (LP: #487900)
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Filter out crashes on missing GLX (LP: #327673)
  • Add bash completion script. Thanks to Philip Muškovac. (LP: #218933)

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Drop APPORT_FILES inclusion list for download() and instead just filter out file extensions that we know about (*.txt and *.gz). (LP: #444975)
  • launchpad.py: Do not put the Tags: field into the bug description, since they are already proper tags. In download(), convert the real tags back to the Tags: field. (LP: #505671)
  • test/crash: Update expected core dump flags for changed rlimit behaviour in Linux 2.6.32.
  • launchpad.py: Fix marking of 'checked for duplicate' for bugs with upstream tasks.
  • launchpad.py, get_fixed_version(): Do not consider a bug as invalid just because it has any invalid distro package task.

1.11 (2009-12-23)

Improvements:

  • Add "--save" UI option to store the collected information into an .apport file instead of sending it right away. The file can then later be sent through apport-bug. Update manpages accordingly.
  • Update all copyright and description headers and consistently format them.
  • Rename all TestCase classes to "_T", which makes it much easier to run individual tests from the command line.
  • Testsuite: Verify that report details are/are not shown. This uncovered that details about package installation failures were not shown before sending them, which is fixed now.

Bug fixes:

  • test/hooks: Do not try to add hook information to kernel_crashdump test case, since we do not have an UI here. This test case broke when the system had an interactive package hook for the kernel.
  • When reporting a bug from a saved .apport file, let the user review/confirm the content before sending.

1.10.1 (2009-12-23)

Improvements:

  • Install apport-collect symlink.
  • Update translations from Launchpad.

Bug fixes:

  • Move all remaining option/argument parsing from apport-bug into ui.py. This allows the user to add options to apport-bug/apport-collect, and also avoids unwieldy dissection of options/arguments in shell.

1.10 (2009-12-19)

New features:

  • Add a mode for updating an existing problem report to ui.py (-u/--update). This is similar to the Ubuntu specific "apport-collect" tool, but implemented the right way now: In particular, this has access to the UI and thus can use interactive hooks (LP: #385811) and show you what is being sent for confirmation/cancelling (LP: #371827)
  • apport-bug: If invoked as "apport-collect" or "apport-update-bug" (i. e. through a symlink), run apport in update mode (-u ). This provides a convenient no-options command line program. Please note that setup.py does not currently install such a symlink. Update the apport-bug manpage accordingly.

Improvements:

  • launchpad.py: Use new login_with() to clean up code, and specify allowed access levels (WRITE_PRIVATE is the only sensible one anyway). (LP: #410205)
  • New hookutils functions: xsession_errors (match lines from ~/.xsession-errors) shared_libraries (determine which libraries a binary links with) links_with_shared_library (test if a binary links with a particular library)
  • New CrashDatabase API: get_affected_packages(), can_update(), is_reporter()
  • Rename CrashDatabase.update() to update_traces().
  • Add CrashDatabase.update() for adding all new fields of a report. This is primarily useful for collecting local standard and package hook data for an already existing bug report which was not filed through Apport. This checks can_update()/is_reporter() if the user is eligible for updating that particular bug. (LP: #485880)

Bug fixes:

  • Ignore SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ; thanks to Kees Cook. (LP: #498074)
  • launchpad.py: Do not mark non-Ubuntu bugs as needs-retrace, since there is no retracer right now. (LP: #489794)
  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py, install_retracing_packages(): Do not crash on malformed Dependencies.txt lines. (LP: #441709)
  • use-local: Fix for new source tree location of "apport" binary.

1.9.6 (2009-12-01)

Improvements:

  • Add pm-utils hook to record current operation, so that apportcheckresume can check it. Before this was kept in Ubuntu's pm-utils package.
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Check if using ecryptfs, and which directory. (LP: #444656)

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Ensure that text attachments on initial bug filing are valid UTF-8. (LP: #453203)
  • man/apport-retrace.1: Document -R option.

1.9.5 (2009-11-20)

Bug fixes:

  • apport-retrace: Fix crash if InterpreterPath/ExecutablePath do not exist.
  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Attach /proc/cpuinfo too, for CPU flags.
  • Fix crash if InterpreterPath does not exist any more at the time of reporting. (LP: #428289)
  • apport-gtk: Connect signals properly, to repair cancel/window close buttons. (LP: #427814)
  • Update German translations and fix "konnre" typo. (LP: #484119)

1.9.4 (2009-11-06)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix crash when ExecutablePath isn't part of a package. (LP: #424965)
  • hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Anonymize disk labels. Thanks to Marco Rodrigues. (LP: #394411)
  • hookutils.py, attach_wifi(): Anonymize encryption key (which appeared in hex when being called as root). Thanks to Marco Rodrigues. (LP: #446299)
  • launchpad.py: If unset, set bug task source package also for interpreter crashes.
  • apport-gtk: Give details window a minimize/maximize button, which were missing in some window managers. Thanks to Marien Zwart. (LP: #447749)
  • apport-kde: Properly terminate program after closing the last dialog. (LP: #458662)
  • hookutils.py, attach_alsa(): Attach /proc/asound/version. (LP: #467233)
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Only collect ~/.xsession-errors bits when we have an ExecutablePath linked to libgtk.

1.9.3 (2009-10-14)

Changes:

  • Drop handling of the APPORT_REPORT_THIRDPARTY environment variable and "thirdparty" configuration file option. This has never been documented, and conceptually does not work. There is a proper mechanism for this in place now, e. g. launchpad.py's "project" option.

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py: Fix error codes from "comm", thanks to Brian Murray.
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Catch xkbcomp error messages. (LP: #431807)
  • launchpad.py: Assert that we have exactly one of "distro" or "project" option.
  • doc/crashdb-conf.txt: Improve documentation of crash database options.
  • apport-gtk: Make Cancel/Send buttons focusable. Thanks to Marco Rodrigues. (LP: #447780)

1.9.2 (2009-10-02)

Improvements:

  • apport-cli: Print the URL and ask whether to open a browser. In many situations (such as usage on a server through ssh), it's preferable to not open the browser on the reporting computer. Thanks to Matt Zimmerman for the initial patch! (LP: #286415)
  • general-hooks/generic.py: Collect important glib errors/assertions (which should not have private data) from ~/.xsession-errors (LP: #431807)
  • launchpad.py: Link hardware data submission key if it exists. (LP: #424382)

Bug fixes:

  • apport-cli: Fix crash with non-ASCII characters in prompts.
  • Fix "apport-bug symptomname" to actually work.
  • launchpad.py: Fix crash on invalid credentials file. Thanks to Marco Rodrigues for the initial patch! (LP: #414055)

1.9.1 (2009-09-22)

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py, attach_hardware(): Do not attach empty Pccardctl*.
  • apport/report.py, add_gdb_info(): Do not throw away stderr from gdb.
  • data/general-hooks/parse_segv.py:
    • Handle arithmetic wrapping correctly.
    • Handle empty base, scale, or index registers in disassembly.
    • Handle in/out ioport faults.
  • Various improvements to user-visible strings, thanks to Marco Rodrigues! (LP: #178507)
  • Various apport-retrace robustifications.
  • setup.py: Fix DistUtilsExtra version check. (LP: #428337)
  • hookutils.py, attach_gconf(): Do not overwrite previous values from other packages, thanks Loïc Minier!
  • hookutils.py, attach_gconf(): Fix crash with nonexisting tags.

1.9 (2009-09-08)

New features:

  • Add "do what I mean" mode to command line argument parsing (applies to all interfaces: -cli, -gtk, -kde). When giving a single argument and no options, determine the most likely mode, like reporting a bug against a symptom, package, executable name, or PID.
  • Add program "apport-bug" which determines the most appropriate user interface (GTK, KDE, CLI) and files a bug through it, using the single argument "do what I mean" mode. This is an improved version of Ubuntu's "ubuntu-bug" script.

Bug fixes:

  • Update apport-cli manpage to current set of options and behaviour. Also point out that apport-gtk and apport-kde share the same CLI.
  • setup.py now installs apport-{gtk,kde} into $prefix/share/apport/, they are not supposed to be called directly. This also reflects the path which the .desktop files expect.
  • setup.py now installs the internal helper scripts like "kernel_crashdump", "apport", or "apportcheckresume" into $prefix/share/apport instead of $prefix/bin.
  • Update usage of gettext to work around Python bug of gettext() not returning unicodes, but str. Fixes UnicodeDecodeErrors on translated --help output.

1.8.2 (2009-09-05)

Bug fixes.

1.8.1 (2009-09-03)

Lots of bug fixes.

1.8 (2009-08-26)

New features:

  • Do not generally ignore SIGABRT any more. Try to extract the assertion message from the core dump, and add it as "AssertionMessage" field. Mark reports as unreportable if they do not have an assertion message and crashed with SIGABRT. This requires your glibc to have this patch: http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commitdiff;h=48dcd0ba
  • report.py, add_hooks_info(): Add optional package/srcpackage argument. Hooks can use that to change the affected package or call hooks from different packages.
  • KDE frontend implementation of ui_question_userpass(), for crash databases which need to ask for credentials.
  • hookutils.py: New function attach_wifi() to add wireless network related information to reports.

Important bug fixes:

  • Fix the test suite on current kernels; test/crash previously often failed with python segfaults, since it killed the test processes too early.

1.7 (2009-08-05):

New features:

  • Support for "symptom" scripts, which figure out the package for a bug report based on interactive questions.

1.6 (2009-07-15)

New features:

  • Integrate analysis and retracing of kernel vmcore crashes with the "crash" tool. Courtesy of Michael Vogt.

Various little bug fixes.

1.5 (2009-06-29)

New features:

  • Drop all Makefiles, po/POTFILES.in, and most code from setup.py, and use DistUtilsExtras.auto which "just does the right thing" for most build system tasks. This requires python-distutils-extra >= 2.2, see https://launchpad.net/python-distutils-extra

Cleanup:

  • Move all test scripts into test/, to unclutter source tree.
  • setup.py now auto-detects the required packaging backend if apport/packaging_impl.py is not manually installed.

1.4 (2009-06-26)

New features:

  • Replaced Qt4 frontend with a KDE frontend for better KDE integration.

Major bug fixes:

  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Add backwards compatibility code for python-apt < 0.7.9 to not break backportability.

1.3 (2009-06-10)

New features:

  • Interactive package hooks:
    • Add apport.ui.HookUI class which provides GUI functionality such as yes/no questions or file dialogs to hooks.
    • add_info() in package hooks now can (optionally) take a second argument which is the HookUI instance.
    • See doc/package-hooks.txt for details.
  • New function apport.hookutils.root_command_output() to run a command as root, through gksu/kdesudo/sudo, depending on the desktop environment.
  • Add general hook for analyzing reason of a segfault.

Bug fixes:

  • Drop "UnsupportableReason" field, it is too similar to UnreportableReason and just confusing.
  • Report key names can now contain dashes ('-') and underscores ('_'). (LP: #380811)

1.2.1 (2009-05-15)

Bug fixes:

  • Fix setup.py and PO file merging for recent .glade -> .ui renaming.

Translations:

  • Update German translations.

1.2.0 (2009-05-15)

Moving away from deprecated APIs:

  • packaging-apt-dpkg.py: Use python-apt >= 0.7.9 official API and drop usage of internal symbols.
  • hookutils.py: Drop hal related functions and queries, replace with udev database, udev log file, and DMI information from sysfs.
  • gtk UI: Convert from libglade to gtk.Builder.

Bug fixes:

  • hookutils.py: Drop /proc/version_signature collection, it is Ubuntu specific.
  • apportcheckresume: Fix log collection from pm-utils.
  • Fix various crashes and report properties for reporting against uninstalled packages.

1.1.1 (2009-04-30)

Security fix:

  • etc/cron.daily/apport: Only attempt to remove files and symlinks, do not descend into subdirectories of /var/crash/. Doing so might be exploited by a race condition between find traversing a huge directory tree, changing an existing subdir into a symlink to e. g. /etc/, and finally getting that piped to rm. This also changes the find command to not use GNU extensions. Thanks to Stephane Chazelas for discovering this! (LP: #357024, CVE-2009-1295)

Bug fixes:

  • launchpad.py: Send and read Date: field again, reverting r1128; it is useful after all. (LP: #349139)
  • Only add ProcAttrCurrent to reports if it is not "unconfined", to remove some noise from reports.
  • Detect invalid PIDs in the UI (such as for kernel processes) and give a friendly error message instead of silently doing nothing. (LP: #360608)
  • Always run common hooks, and run source package hooks if we do not have a binary package name. (LP: #350131)
  • launchpad.py: Consider socket errors when connecting as transient, so that crash-digger doesn't stop completely on them.

1.1 (2009-04-20)

New features:

  • Add hookutils methods for attaching relevant packages, greatly improve attach_alsa() for sound problem debugging.
  • Move launchpad crash database implementation from ever-breaking python-launchpad-bugs (screenscraping) to launchpadlib (official and stable Launchpad API).

Bug fixes:

  • Drop some remaining distro specific pieces of code.
  • Add new field Report.pid which gets set on add_proc_info() and can be used by hooks.
  • setup.py: Properly clean up all generated files, install missing mimetypes/text-x-apport.svg icon symlink.
  • Add README file.
  • Add translations from Launchpad.
  • Remove preloadlib/*; it's undermaintained, and not really useful any more these days.
  • Various bug fixes; most visible being the misnamed etc/default/apport.default file (which should just be etc/default/apport).

1.0 (2009-04-06)

First upstream release, based on Ubuntu packaging branch; that had been the de-facto trunk for many years, but this becomes unpractical with several distributions using it now.