gnome-software (11) g_type_check_instance_is_fundamentally_a → g_object_unref → gs_app_dispose → g_object_unref → g_list_foreach

[errors.ubuntu.com bug bridge]

The Ubuntu Error Tracker has been receiving reports about a problem regarding gnome-software. This problem was most recently seen with package version 3.20.5-0ubuntu0.16.04.7, the problem page at https://errors.ubuntu.com/problem/50e447934d710c3c335b1e5e9d3e386c15513910 contains more details, including versions of packages affected, stacktrace or traceback, and individual crash reports.
If you do not have access to the Ubuntu Error Tracker and are a software developer, you can request it at http://forms.canonical.com/reports/.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Fixed in bionic

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

The crash is occurring cleaning up a GsApp object after a plugin operation has completed. I've looked down code-paths to try and find what could have corrupted the object but not finding anything standing out. It seems possible this might be due to multiple threads accessing data. In 3.22 a lock was added to the data, but this is a major change that can't be backported. It smells like the sort of issue where - have multiple threads - threads interacting badly - add locks - problem goes away (but root cause not found).

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

I investigated the possibility of backporting gnome-software 3.22 to Xenial but the dependencies are too new to be able to do that.