Nautilus tries but fails to auto-install applications needed to open files of a given type

[Adam Dingle]

I'm running Nautilus 3.6.3 on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy).

When I double click a file in Nautilus and there is no application installed which can open the file, Nautilus will try to auto-install an application but the auto-install hangs. Specifically, for example:

1. Make sure that Gnumeric is not installed on your system.
2. Create a file with extension .gnumeric and double click it in Nautlius.

Nautilus will report:

  Could not display "finance.gnumeric".
  There is no application installed for "Gnumeric spreadsheet" files.
  Do you want to search for an application to open this file?

Click Yes. You'll now see a dialog that looks like this:

  Searching for suitable software to open files
  Files requires to install [sic] software to open files of the following file type: Gnumeric spreadsheet

The dialog has a progress bar, which will briefly pulse and then stop. You can now only press Cancel.

A glance at the code shows that Nautilus is trying to send a DBus message to PackageKit to perform the install. There are apparently some PackageKit components on my system (e.g. libpackagekit-glib2-14 is installed), but something is not working.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks Adam, trying to figure out what is happening there I looked at a dbus-monitor log and saw that:

"error sender=:1.444 -> dest=:1.438 error_name=org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.xdg.Exceptions.ParsingError reply_serial=158
   string "Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/defer/__init__.py", line 489, in _inline_callbacks
    result = gen.send(result)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/sessioninstaller/core.py", line 1030, in _install_mime_types
    path))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdg/DesktopEntry.py", line 33, in __init__
    self.parse(filename)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdg/DesktopEntry.py", line 42, in parse
    IniFile.parse(self, file, ["Desktop Entry", "KDE Desktop Entry"])
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xdg/IniFile.py", line 81, in parse
    raise ParsingError("Invalid line: " + line, filename)
ParsingError: ParsingError in file '/usr/share/app-install/desktop/workrave:workrave.desktop', Invalid line: - RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) oraz wspomaga rekonwalescencj\u0119"

removing '/usr/share/app-install/desktop/workrave:workrave.desktop' fixes the issue

I'm adding app-install-data-ubuntu (which ships the broken .desktop), workrave (where the original .desktop comes from) and sessioninstaller (which shouldn't probably stop working because one file has parsing errors) to the affected components

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

in fact there is already a bug for workrave, bug #1176200, I'm going to use that one

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Fixed in lp:session-installer r139 and r140.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package sessioninstaller - 0.20+bzr141-0ubuntu1

---------------
sessioninstaller (0.20+bzr141-0ubuntu1) saucy; urgency=low

  * Update Vcs-* headers for saucy branch.
  * New upstream snapshot:
    - Includes 03_gstreamer_1.0.patch, 04_dont_double_defer.patch,
      05_parent_process_name.patch, drop these.
    - Don't crash on parsing broken .desktop files. (LP: #1190097)
 -- Martin Pitt <email address hidden> Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:50:45 +0200

[Thomas Kluyver (takluyver)]

Thanks, I've just run into this as well. For reference, the bug appeared because I made PyXDG stricter about parsing .desktop files. I'm aware that the break is somewhat annoying, but I think it's ultimately better to throw an exception than to return a potentially incorrect/incomplete object.

[Sebastian Heinlein (glatzor)]

Thomas, the bug did re-occur? Or do you refer to the not fixed version of session-installer?

[Mathew Hodson (mhodson)]

It seems this was fixed with app-install-data (13.10.1).

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/trusty/app-install-data-ubuntu/trusty/revision/101#menu-data/workrave:workrave.desktop

[Mathew Hodson (mhodson)]

Fixed in https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/app-install-data-ubuntu/13.10.1