language selecter crashing when trying to change language region german-german to german-switzerland

[sevku]

language selecter crashing when trying to change language region german-german to german-switzerland

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: language-selector-gnome 0.165.4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-37.42~16.04.1-generic 4.13.13
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-37-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.15
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Thu Mar 22 20:27:05 2018
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/gnome-language-selector
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-12-05 (107 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20170801)
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python3.5
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 SHELL=/bin/bash
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 LANGUAGE=de_DE
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
SourcePackage: language-selector
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for your report.

Can you please start it from a terminal window with:

gnome-language-selector

Then try to change region, and if it crashes again, please let us know the terminal output in a comment here.

[sevku (severin-kunz)]

I just did that, the crash happens every time without exception. I can not change the region.

This is the output:

kunzseverin@kunzseverin-ThinkPad-T430s:~$ gnome-language-selector
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 67, in wrapper
    res = f(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 79, in wrapper
    res = f(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 1096, in on_combobox_locale_chooser_changed
    self.writeUserFormats()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py", line 777, in writeUserFormats
    self.writeUserFormatsSetting(userFormats=code)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/LanguageSelector/LanguageSelector.py", line 75, in writeUserFormatsSetting
    iface.SetFormatsLocale(macr['SYSLOCALE'])
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 70, in __call__
    return self._proxy_method(*args, **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/proxies.py", line 145, in __call__
    **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/dbus/connection.py", line 651, in call_blocking
    message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.Accounts.Error.Failed: running '/usr/share/language-tools/save-to-pam-env' failed: no output
kunzseverin@kunzseverin-ThinkPad-T430s:~$

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Ok. Somehow it fails when trying to save the new value to ~/.pam_environment. Can you please run these three commands and show us what they output:

cat ~/.pam_environment

ls -ld ~

ls -l ~/.pam_environment

[sevku (severin-kunz)]

kunzseverin@kunzseverin-ThinkPad-T430s:~$ cat ~/.pam_environment
kunzseverin@kunzseverin-ThinkPad-T430s:~$ ls -ld ~
drwxr-xr-x 78 kunzseverin kunzseverin 4096 Mär 22 21:51 /home/kunzseverin
kunzseverin@kunzseverin-ThinkPad-T430s:~$ ls -l ~/.pam_environment
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Mär 12 19:16 /home/kunzseverin/.pam_environment

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

For some reason your ~/.pam_environment is owned by root, which it should not be. Run this command to fix it:

sudo chown kunzseverin: ~/.pam_environment

[sevku (severin-kunz)]

Thank you very much for your help.

Somehow you have changed this to Invalid. While I can see that this is "just" a problem with permission, I don't think that the program should crash if it doesnt have permission (for whatever buggy reason). The program should detect that and give a meaningful error message to the user and not just crash.

I have reverted your edit of changing the status to Invalid due to these reasons.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Meaningful, highly visible error messages are nice.

But if config files in $HOME, which programs need to write to, are owned by root, you can't expect your system to work. Programs typically crash then; root owned files in $HOME may even prevent you from being able to log in.

If you can show me a reproducible use case where ~/.pam_environment gets owned by root through normal use of the system, it's indeed a bug which should be fixed. But probably it happened via some mistake you did yourself, and error handling can't reasonably anticipate every possible user error. ;)

With that said, in this case the program did provide useful debugging info; it did "not just crash":

running '/usr/share/language-tools/save-to-pam-env' failed: no output

That's why I easily could point you to what the problem was.