Automagic bug reporting in Python applications for Debian
We all know this situation: a program crashes and you need to send a bug report to the DBTS. The damn bug however is hard to reproduce and you fail to do so and hence can't submit the report.
This has all changed for update-manager now. With the next upload to unstable update-manager will get automagic bug reporting. In short: there is code that detects uncaught exceptions, asks the user if he or she wants to file a bug report and then invokes reportbug. Nothing too special about this yet. There is one thing that should make lives of both bug reporters and developers easier though: the code automatically includes traceback information, that make finding the cause of the problem a lot easier.
Okay, enough of praising this feature of update-manager, this post is about something else. Ubuntu users and developers might think "apport" now, because apport is an application that provides exactly this, reporting of bugs on program crashes, for all users.
At least for Python applications and libraries in Debian providing this functionality should be easy. The only thing one has to do is create a sys.excepthook implementation that does the bug reporting, just as in update-manager.
The questions I have now are:
Do you think this feature would be a good addition to the Debian distribution?