Comment 2 for bug 408331

There may be a subtle "gotcha" here in the way apport works.

1. When a program crash (or other event is recorded by apport, it creates a .crash file in /var/crash with the details of the crash, such as the process stats, core dump, etc.

2. When the user requests that the crash report be submitted to Launchpad, apport adds more information to it, such as the package version information, and runs the hooks.

This means that if you only obtain the original .crash file, it will not contain enough information to diagnose the crash. We need the additional information added by apport in the second step. If you look at the .crash files you see in certification, you'll notice that there is a lot missing from them.

This means that you will want to do some pre-processing of the .crash files *on the system where the crash occurred* before shipping the crash file off somewhere else, in order for it to be useful. I'm not sure if there is an apport command currently available to do this (it's done by apport-cli and apport-gtk as a preliminary step before reporting the bug).

Martin Pitt should be able to advise as to how best to deal with this.