Synaptic segfaults when attempting to run it on oneiric with Norwegian locale

[Hans Joachim Desserud]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to language support and install either "Norwegian (Bokmål)" or "Norwegian (nynorsk)" and set it as the primary language used.
2. Log out and back in again for the language changes to take effect.
3. Run synaptic

Expected result:
Synaptic opens.

Actual result:
Synaptic will crash immediatly. If run from the terminal it prints "Segmentation fault" and no other information.

Running "LC_ALL=C synaptic" to ignore system locale runs fine. I have not tested whether other languages might be affected by this, but for some reason the translations seem to be able to trigger it.

(Note that might not be 100% reproducible. On another machine which was upgraded from Natty, synaptic runs fine in and of itself, however if I mark a package for complete removal and click apply it crashes. Marking for installation (and presumably other actions) works without problems.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: synaptic 0.75.2ubuntu8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic i686
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat Nov 12 20:14:36 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release i386 (20111012)
SourcePackage: synaptic
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Attaching a backtrace from gdb taken when running synaptic and clicking on the status button in the bottom right corner (which shows whether packages are installed, can be removed etc).

Two notes:
1. The error in "1620 vfprintf.c: Ingen slik fil eller filkatalog." translates to No such file or folder.
2. I noticed the string in #1 (format=0x7ffff7ff493d "%i pakker, %i installert, %i ødelagt. %i skal installeres/oppgraderes, %i skal fjernes ; %sB vil bli %s") looked familiar. There was recently reported a bug on some of the Norwegian strings in the translation of synaptic, and this looks like one of them. I wonder if this could somehow be related to bug 880493?

[naguz (naguz-gmx)]

This happens on my mothers laptop running Ubuntu 11.10 also.

NOTE: If I'm not mistaken this also *breaks automatic update checking and notfying of updates*, meaning normal people like my mom will not notice this bug and they will receive bugfixes or security updates!

If this is indeed the case, I'd ask this to receive a priority of Critical, or at least High.

There's just no way the relatively computer/ubntu illiterate would ever happen to run sudo apt-get update or upgrade.

[naguz (naguz-gmx)]

Sorry, of course I meant they will NOT receive security updates or bugfixes.

Also, does anyone know if the translation tools has an open bugreport about this? Not controlling that strings are not improperly escapes seems like a pretty big deal. Oh well, I guess we see the result of Ubuntu having to translations their very own special way instead of just making use of the existing translation work. There is and was a quite good existing community for this. But I digress.

[Marius B. Kotsbak (mariusko)]

Seems to be a duplicate of bug #787173, as running it in english locale solves it in both bug reports.