For this year’s Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD.
For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion.
With this GSoC, Yuru has been bringing some of the missing integration pieces of Debian. For example, we are now using debianbts to to talk to the Debian BTS Server, and fetch bug reports for the user.
While apport’s Bug Report data collection itself is very comprehensive, still for Debian, it will have the option to use native as well as reportbug. This will allow us to use the many hooks people have integrated so far with reportbug. Both Bug Report data collectors will be available.
Yuru has blogged about his GSoC progress so far, here. Please do have a read, and let us know your views. If the travel formalities work out well, I intend to attend Debconf this year, and can talk in more detail.