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I am using Ubuntu 18.10. Sometimes, when some program has just crashed, a window pops up saying the following: "Sorry, Ubuntu 18.10 has experienced an internal error. Send problem report to the developers?" Then there are three buttons: "Show details", "Don't send" and "Send".

If I click "Show details" then it does show details nicely, for example that "gjs-console crashed with SIGABRT" and lots of other info. It seems like a good idea to send this to the developers, so I click "Send". Then the window is closed. I do not get any confirmation that anything was actually sent. I would have liked to get some confirmation like "OK, problem report sent successfully" or something but there is no such confirmation so I am a little worried that something went wrong when I clicked the "Send" button.

My questions:

  • Is anything actually sent to the developers?
  • Is there any way for me to verify that something was actually sent?
  • Can I even see the details of the resulting automatically generated problem report in a public bug tracking system somewhere?

EDIT: according to an answer here: How can I find my Bug-report on launchpad that I submitted from the Desktop? it should be possible to see the resulting bug report by going to https://bugs.launchpad.net/~/+reportedbugs but that does not work for me -- that page just says "There are currently no open bugs." So I am still not sure if any problem report was really sent and if so, where did it end up.

EDIT 2: this seems related also: How can I track a bug that caused a crash and was reported via apport / whoopsie? but after reading that I still don't know how to verify if a problem report was really sent.

EDIT 3: in /var/log/syslog there are a few lines mentioning "whoopsie" saying for example "Uploading /var/crash/_usr_bin_gjs-console.1000.crash." and "Sent; server replied with: No error" which sounds good. Also, the file /var/crash/_usr_bin_gjs-console.1000.crash does seem to contain all the collected error report info.

Elias
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  • I think the .crash files includes all the info. It's just that part of it is saved using some ASCII encoding (probably base64? possibly also compressed before encoded in base64). So if you search the file as text, you'll miss that content. – Alexis Wilke Sep 05 '23 at 20:01

2 Answers2

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If I am right, the information lands here: https://errors.ubuntu.com/

They do a lot of thinking work: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomatedProblemReports

It seems the best solution so far is Apport with whoopsie. But the Documentation says disabled by default. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport

I think this is more a concept, but looks like your Idea (tell the User an ID) is already covered: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ErrorTracker

All together the Error Reports are collected and one main issue to solve is to automatic group the entries. Beside the issue with sensitive data in the report, but this is less fun.

LupusE
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As pointed out here https://askubuntu.com/a/1042812/874649 and also here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apport/+bug/994921/comments/43 the following command can be used to open a web page showing a list of all error reports sent from your own computer, "Error reports sent from this system":

xdg-open https://errors.ubuntu.com/user/`sudo cat /var/lib/whoopsie/whoopsie-id`

So, after clicking "Send" for an error report, the above command can be used to verify that it worked, you should see a new entry in the list with the date and time for the new error report.

Elias
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