checkbox does not notice if its backend does not start

[Andy Whitcroft]

If the checkbox backend cannot start for any reason (here it had no dbus permissions) it will die with an error but the front end continues without noticing the backend is not there. No tests are found or run but the collection and reporting phases run. This is tremendously confusing.

The frontend should notice if the backend explodes and tell the user. It should also notice if its dbus messages are going nowhere.

[David Murphy (schwuk)]

Confirmed.

[David Murphy (schwuk)]

Note that this behaviour is currently only seen when using a branch or tarball, not if the package (>= 0.6) has been installed or the setup procedure followed.

[David Murphy (schwuk)]

It seems that this bug is reproducible using the 0.7 package in Jaunty. arky reported the following when confirming that another bug had been fixed:

> When started it shows two screens only. One main system testing menu
> and when you click next it will build the report and ask to provide
> email address so that it can submit the report. I guess there is a
> pre-built report lying somewhere on the disk that's why it doesn't do
> the tests.
>
> Also if you close the window by clicking the close window icon it close
> with this warning.
>
> 2009-03-18 19:15:56,015 CRITICAL

[arky (arky)]

Thanks Dave, one more thing while updating to 0.7 I get a warning.

dpkg: warning - unable to delete old directory `/var/lib/checkbox': Directory not empty

Does it make much difference if an old 'submission.xml' is present in this directory.

[Marc Tardif (cr3)]

No, /var/lib/checkbox should no longer be used with the introduction of policykit support. The difference is that the CHECKBOX_DATA which was previous set to that path should now be set to ~/.checkbox. So, the xml report will be generated under a subdirectory of the home.

[Рустам Second_Fry Губайдуллин (secondfry)]

Getting this error in 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

krypt@krypt-laptop:~$ checkbox-gtk --version
0.8.6

But in synaptic I can see that 0.9 version is installed.

File /home/krypt/.cache/checkbox/submission.xml contains "untested" in all fields. (unsupported in 2 fields)

[Daniel Manrique (roadmr)]

Checkbox has been using a backend communicating through named pipes for a while now, thus the dbus problems should be gone altogether. Also, the development version now tries a few times to start the backend via sudo (in truth, gksudo should handle reprompting the user, but we work around bug 773284 while being a bit more forgiving) and tries to check for a working backend before asking it to run any tests.

If no working backend is found, the tests will be marked as failed indicating that the test couldn't be run with a short explanation.

See the attached branch for the relevant code.

I'll thus mark this bug as Fix Committed.

Thanks!