Shotwell crashes on launch

[[e-mail]]

I fresh-installed 14.04 on my System 76 the other day and Shotwell worked fine in the beginning, uploading all of my pictures from (including tags and everything from the previous iteration). Now, suddenly, when I open Shotwell, the progress bar shows for a second, checking my photo directory, then opens perfectly for about 5-10 seconds. I'm able to browse and see my photos, no problem, but then the program closes suddenly with no crash report. I have about 60GB of photos, so perhaps my folder is too large? Everything seems to be working fine until it closes.

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

I did a complete removal and re-install of shotwell and discovered that the crash happens during import. I managed to turn off the auto-import function before the program closed and now it doesn't crash anymore. When I try to do a fresh import from my Pictures folder, it crashes again. It's something to do with the importing, if that helps. I read other bugs on here and noticed some mentioning the spike in memory usage when scanning RAW files. Hope that helps.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. However, your crash report is either missing or challenging to deal with as a ".crash" file. Please follow these instructions to have apport report a new bug about your crash that can be dealt with by the automatic retracer.

If you are running the Ubuntu Stable Release you might need to enable apport in /etc/default/apport and restart.

Now open your file manager, navigate to your /var/crash directory and open the crash report you wish to submit.
If this fails you will have to open a terminal and file your report with 'ubuntu-bug /var/crash/_my_crash_report.crash' where _my_crash_report.crash is the crash you would like to report. If you get an error that you aren't allowed to access this report you will have to file it with 'sudo ubuntu-bug /var/crash/_my_crash_report.crash'.

I'm closing this bug report since the process outlined above will automatically open a new bug report which can then dealt with more efficiently. Thanks in advance for your cooperation and understanding.

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

The problem is that Shotwell isn't generating a crash report. It's simply closing when importing because it's overloading or something. I checked my crash report folder, but didn't find any reports relating to shotwell. Sorry this doesn't help. Thank you for reading my bug. Hopefully someone else will be able to be more specific.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Do you have any error if you run it manually on a command line? Can you try to get a backtrace (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace) using gdb?

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

I'm sorry, I've been using Ubuntu for many years now, but I'm still very much a novice who's good at research and copy-paste. I'm not sure how to run shotwell from the command line, except to simply launch it. If you give me more specific instructions, I can run them and get back to you. I looked at gdb and should be able to run that. Do I start gdb first and then try to run shotwell? How does that work? Sorry...

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

I think I figured it out. Hang tight!

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

Here's the output of the gdb txt file:

GNU gdb (Ubuntu 7.7-0ubuntu3) 7.7
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
Type "show configuration" for configuration details.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>.
Find the GDB manual and other documentation resources online at:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/>.
For help, type "help".
Type "apropos word" to search for commands related to "word"...
Reading symbols from shotwell...Reading symbols from /usr/lib/debug/.build-id/b0/4b60768d855862adc804df159b84bf2e255196.debug...done.
done.
(gdb) handle SIG33 pass nostop noprint
Signal Stop Print Pass to program Description
SIG33 No No Yes Real-time event 33
(gdb) set pagination 0
(gdb) run <arguments, if any>
Starting program: /usr/bin/shotwell <arguments, if any>
/bin/bash: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
/bin/bash: -c: line 0: `exec /usr/bin/shotwell <arguments, if any>'
During startup program exited with code 1.
(gdb) backtrace full
No stack.
(gdb) info registers
The program has no registers now.
(gdb) x/16i $pc
No registers.
(gdb) thread apply all backtrace
(gdb) quit

Does that help??

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> (gdb) run <arguments, if any>

that should be "run" if you don't have argument to use

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

Here you go

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is in gst-libav1.0
0x00007fff8c597dd2 in ?? () from /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gstreamer-1.0/libgstlibav.so

It's likely hitting a bug on a video it tries to import. Could you install http://ddebs.ubuntu.com/pool/universe/g/gst-libav1.0/gstreamer1.0-libav-dbgsym_1.2.3-1_amd64.ddeb and get another backtrace?

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

Thank you for all your help with this, I really appreciate it! Here's round 2 of Backtrace, after I installed the gstreamer deb:

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

also i checked the var/crash folder again and found a report.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the details, that's indeed a segfault in gst-libav, it's likely trying to import a video and segfaulting on it. You might want to try to figure which one is creating the issue.

Ideally somebody able to reproduce the bug would report it upstream on https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gstreamer as well

[[e-mail] (chrisedonahoe)]

Thank you!