RFE: launchers should not silently fail when the launched app segfaults

[Marty Vona]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

It appears that my fresh install of ubuntu 7.04 laid down a faulty /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.1200.11 file. That's bad (installer media did verify ok). But that's not what I'm intending to report here.

The file was present and had the correct size and date, but had different binary contents than the same file on (what should have been) an identical system.

On the system with the bad glib file, gnome-terminal would not start. Eventually I discovered it was segfaulting. And after much much more sleuthing I finally discovered the libglib file issue.

Attempting to launch gnome-terminal I got the familiar progress cursor for a little while, and then nothing. Why did I not get an error message? That is my RFE.

I had to eventually launch xterm, and from that try manually launching gnome-terminal from a command line, to see that it was segfaulting.

It further appeared that the glib problem was common to all applications that were trying to use the VTE library. Apparrently this includes update-manager, which was also very silently failing to do its job -- the update selection window would come up, but clicking the "go" button or whatever ultimately did nothing, not even issue an error message.

Again, it is not my intention to report this as anything other than an RFE that gnome app launches which segfault should not be die silently, but should report to the user an error message describing what happened. It surprises me very much that they do not, and also that I found no other such RFE.

Note: I do not feel it would be reasonable to think that since the root issue was a messed up glib binary that such issues cannot be addressed. These things *do* happen and they *do* need to be dealt with as best as possible if we are going to have a system which is truly usuable by everybody and their mom.

Maybe gnome was indeed trying to show me an error message, but maybe the program it was trying to use to do *that* was also segfaulting (maybe because it too was trying to use VTE?). Even then, there should have been a message somewhere. I saw nothing in sytem logs (was I not looking in the right place? Where should I have been looking?). And the error notification system should have some resilience to its own failure, e.g., reverting to a simple xlib dialog in case its fancy gnome-based UI does not init.

In case anyone gets here because they are having a similar problem with silently dying gnome-terminal, try sudo apt-get install --reinstall libglib2.0-0; that fixed the issue for me. You may very well have other problems. Look into debsums.

[Dennis Francis (dennisfrancis)]

Thanks a lot for this report.
Yes I agree with you, segfaults must be reported in a nice user friendly fashion. 'Apport' was designed to do this job+bug reporting. See [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Apport]. Still these Gnome guys must be able to do the same much efficiently.