rubber crashed with OSError in getmtime()

[Scott Shields]

Binary package hint: rubber

Description: Ubuntu jaunty (development branch)
Release: 9.04
rubber:
  Installed: 1.1-2.2
  Candidate: 1.1-2.2
  Version table:
 *** 1.1-2.2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

After installing gedit-latex-plugin, I created a new LaTeX document in gedit and tried converting it to PDF. Being new to LaTeX documents, I didn't realize I was trying to create a blank PDF document. This apparently caused rubber to crash and happened every time. I then figured out what I was doing wrong and after typing some text into the body of the document, everything worked as expected. In any case, a user shouldn't be able to crash a program, even when giving the program null or bad data.

Steps to reproduce:
   1. Create a new Latex document using gedit.
   2. Immediately choose Tools, LaTeX -> PDF.
   3. If you don't get a Application problem (apport-gtk) window right away, wait a bit or close gedit. Sometimes this caused high CPU for me and some fun zombie processes.

ProblemType: Crash
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/rubber
InterpreterPath: /usr/bin/python2.6
Package: rubber 1.1-2.2
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcCmdline: /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/rubber --inplace --maxerr -1 --short --force --warn all --pdf /home/username/Documents/TeX/document.tex
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
PythonArgs: ['/usr/bin/rubber', '--inplace', '--maxerr', '-1', '--short', '--force', '--warn', 'all', '--pdf', '/home/username/Documents/TeX/document.tex']
SourcePackage: rubber
Title: rubber crashed with OSError in getmtime()
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic x86_64
UserGroups: adm admin cdrom dialout libvirtd lpadmin plugdev sambashare

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

I am not exactly sure if it is the same bug that I stumbled upon: The effects were the same, but I thought it was caused by spaces in the file path.

However, attached is a patch (against 1.1-2.4ubuntu1 from Ubuntu 12.04) that quotes the environment variables. The same thing had been done for filenames earlier, but I experienced this issue with the TEXINPUT environment variable, which rubber sets to the directory of the main file.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "rubber_quote_env.patch" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by Brian Murray. Please contact him regarding any issues with the action taken in this bug report.]

[Sebastian Kapfer (caci)]

Thanks for reporting this bug.

Rubber's behavior on empty documents has since changed, so I'm assuming this bug no longer exists. Please open a new bug (including a copy of the TeX file and how rubber is invoked) if the problem still exists.