How do I submit a full bug report with crash dump and steps to reproduce?

I have found a reproducable crash bug in xserver-xephyr. When I run the following command:

apport-bug /var/crash/_usr_bin_Xephyr.1000.crash

it sends a whoopsie report and does not ask me for any extra information such as how to reproduce the bug, which I know. It also doesn't file a real bug report. How am I supposed to do it?

Solution 1:

A good way to report this is to configure Apport to send crash data to Launchpad.

You can configure it back afterwards, if you don't generally want to do this when a program crashes.

Background

What you want is for Apport to collect crash data and submit it to Launchpad, so you can write and submit a bug report with the data attached. This is the behavior of Apport on alpha and beta releases, as well as the behavior (when Apport was enabled) on all releases prior to 12.04.

In Ubuntu 12.04, Whoopsie was introduced.

Whoopsie submits Apport crash data to a database (Daisy) where it can be processed and analyzed in aggregate (then viewed). This is much better than not having the data reported at all, and better than bug reports with insufficient information where the reporter does not provide requested information. Furthermore, bugs in stable releases are sometimes less likely to be fixed unless they can be reproduced in the development release (and with Whoopsie, users are not asked to read bug reporting instructions and file a report, only to find that the bug is not fixed for a long time).

However, well-written bug reports with enough information are still welcomed, for supported Ubuntu releases (which includes your situation).

You can reconfigure Apport so it submits crash data to Launchpad for bug reporting, instead of Daisy for statistical analysis.

Reconfiguring Apport to Send Crash Data to Launchpad

If you disabled Whoopsie as explained here, Apport will be disabled too. So if your goal is to report crash bugs, that's not what you want.

In one of Apport's configuration files, /etc/apport/crashdb.conf, there is a line that says:

        'problem_types': ['Bug', 'Package'],

This is the line that lists the problem types for which data are sent to Launchpad. It lists Bug and Package. Add Crash:

        'problem_types': ['Bug', 'Package', 'Crash'],

Now, when crash data are automatically collected, they will be submitted to Launchpad and a browser window/tab will appear where you can describe the bug (just like before Whoopsie).

References

• Bob Bib (bobbib), Comment 5 for bug 994921
• Neal McBurnett (nealmcb), Comment 13 for bug 993450