accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu12~20.04.1 update crashes into greeter

[Jack Howarth]

When updating Ubuntu 20.04 to the current proposed updates with the accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu12~20.04.1 update, the current gnome session crashes out reproducibly into the the gdm3 greeter. At that point, when you try to log back in, only the background color is displayed but no desktop or menus ever appears. One has to perform a hard reboot at this point to get back to a greeter that will successfully login.

[Jack Howarth (jwhowarth)]

I noticed that one of the changes in accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu12~20.04.1 is...

 * Add patch to not crash in the library when the daemon goes away
    (Closes: #948228) (LP: #1843982)

Does this imply that the existing accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu11 package in 20.04 will crash during upgrades to the newer version due to the absence of this bug fix in the currently running daemon?

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for your report. Can you please add a comment to bug #1843982 too. What you observed might be a regression, and important for the decision whether to let 0.6.55-0ubuntu12 migrate to focal-updates.

[Jack Howarth (jwhowarth)]

Done. I forget to note that I do have autologin set.

[Jack Howarth (jwhowarth)]

I can also confirm that if I disable autologin, reboot and then update to the current packages in focal-proposed updates that the installation of accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu12~20.04.1 from the current accountsservice 0.6.55-0ubuntu11 package completes normally.

[Iain Lane (laney)]

It's not a regression. It is in fact the same bug happening one last time. I just explained it in the other bug, hope that's clear.

(If I'm not understanding right, please un-dupe and re-open this bug.)