Evolutoin crashes when opening a drop-down input

[Oded Arbel]

Binary package hint: libgtk2.0-0

This bug started manifesting after upgrade to Karmic alpha.

The problem is that when I open a pull down menu in Evolution, like the server selector in the Folder->Subscriptions or the Receiving connection type in the mail account preferences dialog, Evolution immediately crashes with a segmentation fault. Not all select boxes cause this crash, I'm not sure what causes one select box to crash the program and others not but it might be related to width: wide drop downs seem to cause the crash while narrow ones do not.

I do not think this is a problem in Evolution as I get the same problem with an Eclipse 3.5 installation in various drop downs (all rather wide), though I did not manage to reproduce this problem using gtk-demo's "Combo Boxes" demo (possibly because they are all narrow?).

Currently this is a very serious problem for me as I really need to be able to open drop-down combo boxes and select content in them. There is no workaround that I could figure out - opening with a keyboard or even trying to choose the next entry with the down arrow key immediately crash the program.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jul 4 02:23:43 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: evolution 2.27.3-0ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.30-10.12-generic
SourcePackage: evolution
Uname: Linux 2.6.30-10-generic x86_64

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[Oded Arbel (oded-geek)]

It is always reproducible for me in eclipse, though in Evolution it is sometimes does not crash.

There are 3 drop-downs in Evolution that cause this problem - the account selector in folder->subscriptions, the server type in the account preferences' receiving tab and the server type in the account preferences' sending tab. If I try to access evolution immediately after I log in, then the drop-downs do not crash the program immediately, but if I continue to use Evolution for a while then after a few minutes accessing any of the mentioned drop-downs will crash the program immediately, after which any time I run the program it will crash.

In regards to me previous comment about the width of the drop-down - this is unlikely the problem as the account selector in the mail composer, which is as wide as the composer menu, does not crash evolution for me.

In Eclipse, the commit dialog's "previous comment" drop-down as well as a few others cause this problem for me.

I managed to generate a core dump from evolution, which is attached. I also did an strace but I don't think there was anything interesting there, but let me know if you want its output.

[Darren Adams (darrengetsone)]

I have noticed this happening to me a lot as well when I use drop-down lists in a number of programs that I use regularly, namely:

* Epiphany
* Transmission
* Gwibber (unfortunately this just segfaults, leaving no useful output / error messages)

I've also seen this happen in Nautilus too, but that just restarts. Sometimes, an error is For instance, I see this error in ~/.xsession-errors when Transmission crashes when I try to select an item from a drop-down list

(transmission:17208): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_tree_sortable_set_sort_column_id: assertion `GTK_IS_TREE_SORTABLE (sortable)' failed.

If I can find a way to consistently reproduce the crash, I'll produce a core dump and post it here.