It was already suggested in a coupleof threads that a standard tool to report bugs against a snap package would be useful.
I find myself very often filing bugs on launchpad against the source packages for libreoffice and chromium-browser (which I appropriately tag with the snap keyword), from problems that users report on the forum (usually after a call for testing). When I do that I have to ask them for the version of the snap in question, the version of the core snap, their distribution, and other useful information. Thatâs time consuming.
Iâm thinking it would be useful if snaps could optionally define in their metadata a launchpad project / source package for bug tracking, which would enable a snap bug $SNAP_NAME command, which would itself do something similar to ubuntu-bug, with additional, snap-specific information (possibly extensible with something similar to apport hooks).
That wonât help for projects that have zero presence on launchpad. Consider once a project releases their own snap where none of the projectâs developers use Ubuntu and thus donât ever check launchpad for bugs.
Snap packages are orthogonal to Ubuntu and therefore we shouldnât push snap-specific bugs into Ubuntu-specific forums. We should instead investigate how to get snap-specific bug reports to the correct people rather than dumping them all on launchpad and expecting the developers to check there because âarbitrary reasonsâ.
Thatâs why I wrote âif snaps could optionally define in their metadata a launchpad project / source package for bug trackingâ. That would be an opt-in feature for snap maintainers, not something enabled by default for all snaps. And auto-completion of the snap bug command would list only snaps that opted in.
I am very well aware that not all upstreams use launchpad to track bugs in their projects, but some do, and itâs an easy place to start with because thereâs already all the apport/ubuntu-bug machinery in place. A more generic system able to dispatch bugs to various bug trackers would of course be interesting, but it would most likely require much more work to design and implement.
I have made a simple experiment that adds a filebug command to the libreoffice snap. Not exactly what I was suggesting above, just something to toy with and see how useful the idea might be.
It works in a similar fashion to ubuntu-bug, but is specific to that snap. It will open a browser tab to file a bug against the libreoffice source package in launchpad, with a pre-filled summary prefixed with â[snap]â and a âsnapâ tag already set. Some information about the system is automatically attached to the bug report. Unfortunately as it runs confined there is no way (that I know of) to access information about the core snap and about the current channel. But a lot of useful information can already be extracted from the environment. An example of a bug filed with this command is bug #1755928.
This is currently in the beta channel, if anyone is interested in testing it (please use it to file actual issues!).
And this is what the script looks like: filebug.py (largely inspired by apport-bug's implementation).
Constructive criticism, suggestions and feedback welcome!
Given that, as you said, it is very similar to apport (ubuntu-bug), wouldnât it make sense to extend apport to support snap packages and package apport itself as a snap to make it available on other distributions (modulo patching any specificity of Ubuntu to work on other distributions) ?
Yes, that makes sense. Thatâs beyond the scope of a quick experiment though, itâs probably a sizeable amount of work. Anyone with an interest in bug reporting for snaps and/or apport, please chime in!
Did anything happen here? I have seen people report they canât file bugs against snaps for 20.04. Wondered if anything moved forward in the 2 years since this thread?
Just installed from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS âFocal Fossaâ - Alpha amd64 (20200329)
started snap-store, search for GIMP I am only offered the snap version despite the Focal(universe) repository is enabled. started âUbuntu-bug -wâ and click on snap-store window i have a window with a lot of messages starting with âThe crashed program seems use third-party or local libraries:â and then a list of files in /snap/snap-store/âŚ