Changing text color in Thunderbird table will crash gnome desktop

[John Agosta]

Changing text color in Thunderbird table will crash gnome desktop.

I have reproduced this multiple times.

Reproduction steps:
1) Open Thunderbird
2) New mail
3) Add Table to mail
4) Format->Table->Table or Cell background Color
5) Select the color dialog

At this point the color pallet will open, and the desktop manager will then crash

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 19.10
Package: gnome-shell 3.34.1-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.3.0-19.20-generic 5.3.1
Uname: Linux 5.3.0-19-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu8.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Thu Oct 31 11:15:11 2019
DisplayManager: gdm3
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-05-21 (162 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20190210)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
RelatedPackageVersions: mutter-common 3.34.1-1ubuntu1
SourcePackage: gnome-shell
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to eoan on 2019-10-22 (8 days ago)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It sounds like some part of the system has crashed. To help us find the cause of the crash please follow these steps:

1. Look in /var/crash for crash files and if found run:
    ubuntu-bug YOURFILE.crash
Then tell us the ID of the newly-created bug.

2. If step 1 failed then look at https://errors.ubuntu.com/user/ID where ID is the content of file /var/lib/whoopsie/whoopsie-id on the machine. Do you find any links to recent problems on that page? If so then please send the links to us.

3. If step 2 also failed then apply the workaround from bug 994921, reboot, reproduce the crash, and retry step 1.

Please take care to avoid attaching .crash files to bugs as we are unable to process them as file attachments. It would also be a security risk for yourself.

[John Agosta (jagosta)]

Hi:
I had to use step 3 and the new bug report is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1850881

Now, there are a number of (IMHO) really weird things that also happened in this round of reproductions:

After reproducing the crash, I had these crash files:
-rw-r----- 1 jagosta whoopsie 193242154 Oct 31 21:43 _opt_google_chrome_chrome.1000.crash
-rw-r----- 1 jagosta whoopsie 0 Oct 31 21:51 _usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.crash

So, the gnome crash file was empty this time, but there was also a chrome crash file, so I tried running `ubuntu-bug` on the chrome crash file. When I did this it stated that it failed to generate a report because google-chrome was out of date and needed to be updated.

So, I updated `google-chrome-stable (78.0.3904.87-1) to (78.0.3904.70-1)`, and then I tried to reproduce the bug. This time, the gnome window manager appeared to crash and then reset -- so I did not lose the window manager. But, Chrome and Thunderbird both crashed.

I was left with these crash files:
-rw-r----- 1 jagosta whoopsie 38273264 Oct 31 22:02 _usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.crash
-rw-r--r-- 1 jagosta whoopsie 0 Oct 31 22:02 _usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.upload
-rw------- 1 whoopsie whoopsie 37 Oct 31 22:02 _usr_bin_gnome-shell.1000.uploaded

Bug # 1850881 was submitted for this gnome-shell crash file.

I am really curious how updating chrome is impactign the behavior of both Thunderbird and Gnome.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thanks. It seems to be bug 1849249 so let's track it there.