friends app crashes on start.

[Raymond Wells]

Friends app crashes instantly when loading.

Steps to reproduce:
Run friends app from the terminal, or click the "Friends" logo in the dash.

Expected Behavior:
Friends app displays timeline.

Actual behavior:

Friends app never comes up. If run from the terminal, the "Segmentation Fault" message is seen.

----
Output from GDB:

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: friends-app 0.90.0bzr13.04.17-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.9.0-0.4-generic 3.9.0
Uname: Linux 3.9.0-0-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.10-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun May 5 00:46:14 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-02-28 (66 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" - Alpha amd64 (20130225)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: friends-app
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-05-05 (0 days ago)

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

I'm not able to reproduce this, but I suspect it's just another symptom of that same other bug (the TypeError in friends-dispatcher). Can you update to the latest saucy and try again? I fixed that bug and it should fix this one, too.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. As I said before, I'm not able to reproduce this, and I suspect that it's actually fixed already. Can everybody affected please update to the latest version of friends, reproduce the bug again, and then tell me what version of friends you have installed? As it is I don't have enough information to resolve this.

It would also be helpful if you could attach your friends.log file, located at ~/.cache/friends/friends.log.

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

According to Launchpad, friends-app is the same version on both raring and saucy (0.90.0bzr13.04.17-0ubuntu1). Is there some other version we should be aware of?

I was able to reproduce the traceback in the gdb trace attached above. I've also attached friends.log after deleting the old one, killing all friends-related services, and restarting friends-app (and getting the segfault).

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

Checking out lp:friends-app on my system, I'm able to reproduce the crash exactly with a local build ("debian/rules binary" followed by running src/friends-app). The crash reliably reproduces itself with revisions 69 through 72. On revision 73, I get the following output in the terminal:

virtual void OnlineAccounts::Plugin::registerTypes(const char*) Ubuntu.OnlineAccounts
virtual void FriendsPlugin::registerTypes(const char*) Friends
file:///nethome/jeff/software/friends/friends-app/qml/friends-app.qml:64:17: Cannot assign to non-existent property "opened"
                     opened: true
                     ^

The friends-app icon in Unity shows that it's running, and I can close the app by right-clicking and choosing "Quit", but no Friends window appears on the screen.

So no, the bug does not appear to be fixed already.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Thanks for investigating this further, Jeff. I apologize I haven't had time to deal with a number of issues facing friends recently, but I'm hoping to devote more time soon.

[Philipp Bielefeldt (p-bielefeldt)]

With no obvious reason, friends-app started crashing as well on my computer (beforehand, it worked fine); Message:

>>
~$ virtual void OnlineAccounts::Plugin::registerTypes(const char*) Ubuntu.OnlineAccounts
virtual void FriendsPlugin::registerTypes(const char*) Friends
QQmlComponent: Component is not ready
MODEL: "com.canonical.Friends.Streams"
account-service-model.cpp 266 update
account-service-model.cpp 266 update
Twitter Supports send
accounts.count: 2
static void StreamModelPrivate::onModelReady(GObject*, GParamSpec*, StreamModelPrivate*) 2000
STREAM: "" ROWS: 2000
SERVICE: "" ROWS: 2000

[1]+ Speicherzugriffsfehler (Speicherabzug geschrieben) friends-app
<<

"Speicherzugriffsfehler" = Segmentation violation (I guess, I didn't know, there's a German word for it^^).
I am pretty sure not to have changed anything since last log-in, so I don't have a clue how this happend. Sorry.

Using friend-app on Ubuntu 13.04, x86_64

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Philipp, that looks like a different error message than the one Jeff posted. Can you report a new bug with that information please?

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Jeff: Your error looks like you are using an old version of qtdeclarative5-ubuntu-ui-toolkit-plugin. lp:friends-app has been updated for the new toolbar API in saucy. You have the raring version of the toolkit. The branch for raring is lp:friends-app/13.04

However, I think this crash is because of an account you have enabled. Can you please give me the output of "account-console list" (maybe XX out usernames).

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

This is actually a bug in the qml bindings to friends, it isn't handling the featuresForProtocol return from libfriends for some accounts.

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

account: id 4, enabled, provider: google
account: id 3, enabled, provider: twitter
account: id 2, enabled, provider: identica
account: id 1, enabled, provider: facebook

I've turned off linkage to the identica account due to the impending conversion to pump.io, and of course google isn't connected to Friends.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

I found some time to play with this again today and I still can't reproduce it. Neither on raring or saucy, with updated packages. It's just not crashing for me. Ken, you seem to know more about what's happening here. Can you provide more insight about a workaround or a fix?

It's no longer true that saucy and raring have the same version of friends-app, so most likely there's even more drift between lp:friends-app and the dependencies shipped with raring.

Jeff, can you uninstall any custom PPAs or custom-compiled binaries you might have, and just use the stock distro packages? Also, are you using raring or saucy?

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

On 08/03/2013 10:36 AM, Robert Bruce Park wrote:
> Jeff, can you uninstall any custom PPAs or custom-compiled binaries you
> might have, and just use the stock distro packages? Also, are you using
> raring or saucy?

I'm running raring. Here's a list of external archives I run:

 - Dropbox

 - Google Chrome

 - LSB development (for my work)

 - ownCloud

 - Steam

 - The XBMC development PPA

 - The Wine PPA

Of these, the XBMC and Wine PPAs seem like the most likely sources of
problems. I'll try getting rid of those. The LSB stuff is also easy
for me to get rid of, in case there's some odd thing going on there.

Unfortunately, "just run stock" is a good debug scenario, but a complete
non-starter when it comes to regular day-to-day running of my system.

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

On 08/05/2013 11:44 AM, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> Of these, the XBMC and Wine PPAs seem like the most likely sources of
> problems. I'll try getting rid of those. The LSB stuff is also easy
> for me to get rid of, in case there's some odd thing going on there.

I've purged both of these using ppa-purge, and friends-app still segfaults.

Is there a way to purge all friends-app data and "start over"? I'm
wondering if that would help.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Yes, you can clear all Friends data and start fresh. First, you have to get it out of memory:

    killall friends-dispatcher friends-service friends-app

Then you have to delete it's files:

    rm -rf ~/.cache/friends ~/.local/share/resources/com.canonical.Friends.Streams

Then you can run friends-app again and it should work.

[Jeff Licquia (jeff-licquia)]

On 08/05/2013 02:24 PM, Robert Bruce Park wrote:
> Yes, you can clear all Friends data and start fresh. First, you have to
> get it out of memory:
>
> killall friends-dispatcher friends-service friends-app
>
> Then you have to delete it's files:
>
> rm -rf ~/.cache/friends
> ~/.local/share/resources/com.canonical.Friends.Streams
>
> Then you can run friends-app again and it should work.

After doing this, friends-app started working again w/o crashing. It
started out with only a few Twitter tweets, but fairly quickly started
showing a full feed, including Facebook posts.

I deleted both the cache and the resources file. After restoring both
of these from backup, I was able to cause friends-app to segfault once
again. Removing just the cache, and not the resource file, restored
functionality (although with a bunch of entries that were 54-odd days
old). I didn't take the time to verify that the functionality was
complete in that case; I simply killed off friends-* again, removed the
cache and resources, and restarted.

I still have the cache handy, and can tell you things about it if you
think it would help to diagnose the segfault.

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

Yes, please. There should be a .log file and a couple .json files but there shouldn't really be any reason that these should be causing crashes. There already was a case of crashes that I resolved by catching a previously uncaught exception under certain (rare) conditions. Even still, this shouldn't cause friends-app itself to crash, it should still launch and just not have any updates visible due to the backend crashing. So I find it really strange that the frontend is crashing in this way.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Robert Bruce Park (robru)]

I still need to see that log file that I asked for in commetn #18. And I still can't reproduce this.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for qml-friends (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for friends-app (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]