help cannot be displayed for multiple apps in natty

[Eliah Kagan]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

In an Ubuntu Classic Desktop session on a Natty i386 system with gnome-panel package version 1:2.32.1-0ubuntu4, right-clicking in most places on the panel and clicking Help fails, raising a message box with the title "Error" and the message:

Could not display help document 'user-guide'
The specified location is not supported

This occurs when right-clicking the panel and clicking Help in any of the following places:
(1) the top panel, in blank space (it should bring up help topic "Using the Panels")
(2) the top panel, on a menu (it should bring up the help topic "Using the Main Menubar")
(3) the bottom panel, on the Show Desktop button (it should bring up the help topic "Show Desktop Button")
(4) the bottom panel, in blank space (it should bring up the help topic "Using the Panels")
(5) the bottom panel, in the desktop switcher (it should bring up the help topic "Workspaces")

When I right-click the bottom panel on the trash can icon and click Help, I get a similar, but different, error. Instead of loading help topic "Panel Trash Manual" in yelp, a message box with no title is raised, with the message:

There was an error displaying help: The specified location is not supported

The two different error message boxes (for the trash can, and for everything else) are also of different styles. I will attach images of each. Besides the information provided by the images, they also differ in that the message box for everything except the trash can appears in the taskbar, and the message box for the trash can doesn't.

Note that clicking System > Help and Support or clicking System > About Ubuntu both still work fine, as does loading the help browser manually by running the command "yelp" or running the command "gnome-help".

I have tried quitting the GNOME Panel ("killall gnome-panel") and re-running it in a terminal -- when the errors occur, no output is printed to the command line.

I have tried, and failed, to reproduce this bug on a Maverick i386 system.

I am unsure if I am reporting this bug in the correct package. However, the error messages seem to belong to gnome-panel. Yelp is not running when the error messages are displayed (i.e. "ps x" doesn't reveal any running instances of a process called "yelp" or "gnome-help"). Perhaps I should instead be reporting this bug in yelp (2.30.2-0ubuntu1), ubuntu-docs (10.10.4), or gnome-user-guide (2.30.0+git20100403ubuntu2).

This bug report is superficially similar to a bug report on Red Hat Bugzilla (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=595650) -- however, these are NOT the same bug, as in that bug, the problem was that gnome-panel 'Failed to execute child process "gnome-help" (No such file or directory)'. That is not the case here, and gnome-help exists in /usr/bin on my system. I mention that bug report only to reduce confusion, since it comes up in a Google search for the error message in this bug.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome-panel 1:2.32.1-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.37-11.25-generic 2.6.37-rc7
Uname: Linux 2.6.37-11-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Dec 28 23:28:03 2010
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-panel
GConfNonDefault:
 /apps/panel/general/applet_id_list=[fast_user_switch_screen0,trashapplet_screen0,workspace_switcher_screen0,window_list_screen0,show_desktop_button_screen0,indicator_applet_screen0,notification_area_screen0,clock_screen0]
 /apps/panel/general/object_id_list=[browser_launcher_screen0,menu_bar_screen0,object_0]
 /apps/panel/general/toplevel_id_list=[bottom_panel_screen0,top_panel_screen0]
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Alpha i386 (20101202)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US:en
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-panel
XsessionErrors:
 (yelp:1966): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_tool_button_new: assertion `icon_widget == NULL || GTK_IS_MISC (icon_widget)' failed
 (yelp:1966): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_toolbar_insert: assertion `GTK_IS_TOOL_ITEM (item)' failed
 (yelp:1966): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_tool_button_new: assertion `icon_widget == NULL || GTK_IS_MISC (icon_widget)' failed
 (yelp:1966): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_toolbar_insert: assertion `GTK_IS_TOOL_ITEM (item)' failed

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Well, this is odd. Even though right-clicking on the GNOME Panel and clicking Help fails to bring up the "Using the Panels" help topic, running this command (which is the same command that gnome-panel executes to achieve this effect, at least on Maverick) is successful:

gnome-help ghelp:user-guide?gospanel-1

Furthermore, to bring up the "Panel Trash Manual" help topic, this command (the one that gnome-panel executes automatically, at least on Maverick) is successful:

gnome-help ghelp:trashapplet

Perhaps gnome-panel is using the wrong names for the help pages. I don't know why those names, as coded into gnome-panel, would have changed in Natty though, given that the correct names don't appear to have changed in Natty (since Maverick).

[Joanmarie (joanmarie-diggs-deactivatedaccount)]

I'd be curious to know if you can get any gnome application help to display in Natty using the application's means (push buttons, menu items, pressing F1) for doing so. So far I've tried:

* orca (aka gnome-orca)
* gnome-terminal
* rhythmbox
* evolution

In all cases it fails: gio.Error: The specified location is not supported

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Unfortunately I had to wipe out the Natty system where I experienced this bug. I plan to reinstall Natty soon, and if the bug affects the newly installed system, then I'll go ahead and check to see if I'm able to bring up help inside those other four applications.

[Joanmarie (joanmarie-diggs-deactivatedaccount)]

Thanks Eliah. It was a somewhat rhetorical question, really. Help is borked.

I know jack about gio. However, whilst poking into this a tad I noticed the following:

  gio.app_info_get_default_for_uri_scheme() returns None for 'ghelp'.

Related aside: as a check to see if I was using this method correctly, I tried to get the uri_scheme for 'http'. The following was returned: default for 'http' <gio.unix.DesktopAppInfo at 0x9c73cfc: Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Web Browser> I wonder if this explains why, even though my session default browser is Chrome, Evolution insists on launching Firefox. But I digress....

gio does seem to know about yelp:

  <gio.unix.DesktopAppInfo at 0x9ae68ec: Help>, executable: yelp, supports_uris: False

Odd that it doesn't support URIs....

Normally I don't change Summaries on other people's bugs, or downstream bugs. Pardon my making the exception in this case.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

I have no objection to your improving the summary line in this bug. However, are you sure the problem with help in those other applications is really the same as the problem I experienced? When I attempted to open Panel Help from the GNOME Panel, I got this error message:

Could not display help document 'user-guide'
The specified location is not supported

Is that exactly the same error message that you get, when you attempt the same thing.

This issue would be much easier if I still had that Natty system. Hopefully it will suffer from this problem when I reinstall it. ;-)

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Correction: ...when you attempt the same thing. --> ...when you attempt the same thing?

[Joanmarie (joanmarie-diggs-deactivatedaccount)]

I'd bet money on it being the same issue. ;-)

In terms of gnome-orca: I'm the co-maintainer. We've not changed anything w.r.t. how help is launched. And yet suddenly, in Natty, I get the same error you do for gnome-panel. And I get that same issue for other gnome apps. Add to the list:

* gcalctool
* aisleriot solitaire
* shotwell
* epiphany
* [...]

In every last case, it's "The specified location is not supported." The exception type happens to be gio.Error, but in a dialog box (as opposed to a traceback), you don't see the "gio.Error."

[Joanmarie (joanmarie-diggs-deactivatedaccount)]

Adding 'yelp' as also being impacted. I'm not convinced the bug is in 'yelp' per se. In fact, I'd guess it's not. But if this bug sits around in 'gnome-panel' (which is deprecated upstream), no one is going to notice it.

Apologies to the downstream yelp guy. And thanks in advance for redirecting it to where it really belongs. ;-)

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Ah, I see. Yes, I agree that it almost certainly is the same bug. Thanks for working on this!

I'll still let you know if I can reproduce it, when I set up Natty again. Do you know if there are any up-to-date Natty systems that are *not* affected by this?

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

As well as gnome-panel in ubuntu and Yelp, we also say that this affects yelp in ubuntu?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue is not a gnome-panel one, testing there it seems f1 is working and unsetting UBUNTU_MENUPROXY workaround the issue as well, the issue seems to be with the indicator-appmenu only, can you confirm that's the case for you?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

This looks like just a dup of 673362? I can't get this failure since using yelp 2.30.2-0ubuntu2.

[Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure)]

Yes, it does seem that this might be a duplicate of bug 673362.