Problem Reporting (abrt) should play better with Flatpaks

Flatpaks are great. Flatpaks are the future of Linux packaging, and also of Fedora (Silverblue, etc.)

Sadly, when a Flatpak application crashes, the default abrt handler starts and of course fails generating a backtrace and doing anything useful because it doesn’t know how to handle Flatpak-packaged applications.

This is an understandable shortcoming of a relatively new technology, but I think greater effort is needed to make sure bug reporting works for these apps, as it’s the first time in the Linux world that we have applications that work more or less the same whatever the distro, and are ideally as close to upstream as the developer wanted, so a Flatpak app bug more often than not affects every other distro, and if the developer were aware of it, they could fix the problem for everybody. The potential for positive impact is incredible in my opinion.

I like what Fedora is doing with Flatpaks and I trust that the devs will make this a reality soon enough, I just wanted to push the thing forward a little bit :slight_smile:

(Did I already say that Flatpaks are great?)

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Hello @1player ,
Welcome to :fedora: discussion area! Glad to hear you like flatpak’s, there are still things to be worked out as you note. One of them https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1222 would seem to be what you are referring to.

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Thanks, though things seem not to have moved very much since 2018. One comment from mcatanzaro says:

Moreover, abrtd is smart enough to read core dumps stored in systemd-coredump – in fact, that is its default behavior in F27 – and as long as ABRT can read a useful stack traces for the crash out of coredumpctl, it should automatically start report the bug to the FAF server.

I’m a new Fedora user, I don’t know if it was worse in F27, but in F35 every time a Flatpak app crashes, abrt starts and throws its hands in the air because it can’t generate a coredump and it doesn’t know what to do with the crash.

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Yeah I believe ABRT is the one that needs to be nudged about this. It isn’t up to flatpak (the runtime) to update where ABRT looks for info I would think. This issue seems to be the one in use ATM.

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Cross-posting to an older thread for future people who end up here via web search: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gnome-abrt-cant-upload-crash-reports-from-flatpak-apps/66462/6

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