I sometimes find small bugs in dialogs or windows. For instance, I found a very minor bug in the sound preference dialog. I thought I'd report it, but it wasn't obvious what package provides the dialog.
Is there a simple tool to do that? I would imagine something like xwininfo; you'd run the command, the mouse pointer would change and when you click a window, the command returns the package name. With such a command, it would be easy to expand it to gather version information, distro and open the bug tracker on the right page.
We used to have Help > Report a problem, but since Gnome Control Center doesn't use menus, that option is not available. This, of course, would be true for all windows that doesn't use menus. So; is there an alternative?
Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t) and type
a message will pop up instructing you to click on a window to file a bug report about the application owning that window.
Incidentally, this uses apport, which collects a lot of useful debugging information automatically and is the preferred way to report Ubuntu bugs.
roadmr's answer above is by far the best way to go, but I wanted to see if I could come up with a bash one-liner that reports back the correct source package. It's even messier than I imagined since you apparently can't pipe to
dpkgorwhich.dpkg -S $(which $(xprop | grep "WM_CLASS(STRING)" | grep -o "\".*\"" | cut -d "," -f 1 | tr -d '""')) | cut -d ":" -f 1Let's unpack this a little. The
grepandcutstuff are simply searching for and manipulating strings. The interesting things are:xprop- Lets you find out information about the window you click on.which- Returns the full path of the command used. Example:dpkg -S- Given a file, provides the name of the source package it comes from. Very useful when the binary name and source package name differ. Example: