No way to submit bug without ubuntu-bug or apport.

I don't have ubuntu-bug or apport installed, and don't want to install them.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn't, because my bug report happens to be against apt (or possibly dpkg) itself.

So how do I report such a bug?

I think the insistance on only using ubuntu-bug and apport is taken a bit too far when the "report a bug" link on Launchpad only goes to a wiki document describing how to use ubuntu-bug, and there is no other link or method offered anywhere.

The bug I wanted to report is that something, maybe part of dpkg, maybe part of apt, maybe something else I don't even know about, but something along the way during "apt-get dist-upgrade" or apt-gt upgrade" wants to use "tar" with gnu-tar specific command line options, but, whatever it is that wants to use gnu-tar specifically in this way, is not doing anything to ensure that it gets the special version of tar that it needs.

----screen cap----
...
1057 upgraded, 116 newly installed, 7 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/774 MB of archives.
After this operation, 192 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
tar: Bad Option: --warning=no-timestamp.
Usage: tar cmd [options] file1 ... filen

Use tar --help
and tar --xhelp
to get a list of valid cmds and options.

For a more complete user interface use the tar type command interface.
See 'man star'. The tar command is more or less limited to the
Solaris tar command line interface.
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess tar returned error exit status 255
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/libc-bin_2.17-93ubuntu4_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/libc-bin_2.17-93ubuntu4_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
root@noexcuse:~#
----screen cap----

What happened is, I happen to have star (Schily's Tar), manually compiled and installed in /usr/local/bin
and the makefile for that installed a "tar" symlink in /usr/local/bin.

Sane apps have no problem with that. If you call "tar" unadorned with no path and no unique name like gnu-tar or gtar etc, then you should only use plain universal posix tar options. If you are going to use features that are particular to gnu-tar, then you should somehow ensure that that is the version that gets used instead of leaving it to chance or making unsafe assumptions. In this case, specifying the path to /usr/bin/tar would be good enough.

Since I have diagnosed it this far, I can work around it of course, and get apt-get working again, but this is a bug in dpkg or apt (my best guess is one of those two anyway) that should be reported, but I discover that I actually can not report this bug! Yet more unsafe assumptions in the ubuntu system, assuming ubuntu-bug is always available and always functions etc. Very poor looking sequence there.

Think about this for a second: The bug-reporting system, requires a lot of things to function correctly, on the very system that is experiencing some kind of bug.