[Reportbug-maint] Bug#703678: reportbug is not derivative-friendly, at least not when using a web bugtracker

[Raphaël Hertzog]

Package: reportbug
Version: 6.4.4
Severity: normal

reportbug should have a sane default behaviour when run on Debian
derivatives. It should not fallback to sending bug reports to Debian
when the machine is clearly not a Debian machine.

Derivatives should only have to fork base-files and update the information
there to get a sane behaviour. When putting correct information
in /etc/os-release and /etc/dpkg/origins/default, reportbug should
be able to decide what to do with a bug report.

┏(kali-amd64) x230-buxy:~
┗(524)$ cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Kali GNU/Linux 1.0"
NAME="Kali GNU/Linux"
ID=kali
VERSION="1.0"
VERSION_ID="1.0"
ID_LIKE=debian
ANSI_COLOR="1;31"
HOME_URL="http://www.kali.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://forums.kali.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.kali.org/"
┏(kali-amd64) x230-buxy:~
┗(525)$ cat /etc/dpkg/origins/default 
Vendor: Kali
Vendor-URL: http://www.kali.org/
Parent: debian
Bugs: http://bugs.kali.org
┏(kali-amd64) x230-buxy:~
┗(530)$ reportbug apt
*** Welcome to reportbug.  Use ? for help at prompts. ***
[...]
Will send report to Kali (per lsb_release).
Kali bug tracking system has no web URL; bypassing query
[...]
Report will be sent to "Debian Bug Tracking System" <submit at bugs.debian.org>
Submit this report on apt (e to edit) [y|n|a|c|E|i|l|m|p|q|d|t|s|?]? 
^C

Really, reportbug should have noticed that this is not Debian and that Kali
is using a web-based bugtracker. As such reportbug can't send its bug report
by mail. Instead it should warn the user that the proper way to report
a bug is to go visit http://bugs.kali.org. It would offer to continue
in --template mode so that the user has the required information ready to
paste in his web-based bugreport.

BTW, I don't think that reportbug gains much by using lsb_release to
gather distro information. Right now it's not working well (see #703677)
and furthermore parsing /etc/os-release is easy and you already parse
/etc/dpkg/origins/* anyway.

Cheers,
 Raphaël Hertzog.