Invalid access when opening eps with ghostscript 9.19~dfsg+1-0ubuntu6.2 and libspectre 0.2.8

[Jeremy Bícha]

1. Install the latest Ubuntu security update for ghostscript (since this does not appear to have been released for zesty, it is a bit easier to do this from Ubuntu 16.10 than from 17.04).

2. Install libspectre1 0.2.8-1 (from zesty or zesty-proposed).

3. Open a .eps with Evince, Ubuntu's default viewer for eps files. Here's a test file:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libspectre/+bug/1348384/+attachment/4171120/+files/countrate.eps

What happens:
The .eps fails to display. If run from a terminal, this is output:

invalidaccess -7

Earlier version of libspectre (I tested Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.10) still handle the test .eps file ok.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: ghostscript 9.19~dfsg+1-0ubuntu6.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-28.30-generic 4.8.6
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-28-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Tue Dec 6 21:52:04 2016
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-08-11 (117 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Alpha amd64 (20160811)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ghostscript
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to yakkety on 2016-10-27 (40 days ago)

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I am going to go ahead and set the 'block-proposed' tag since we don't want zesty to break when ghostscript is updated next there.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

"invalidaccess -7" looks like a failure of Ghostscript.

I tried to open the .eps file directly with Ghostscript and it gets correctly displayed. So I do no know how evince uses Ghostscript and so I cannot report an upstream bug in Ghostscript.

What I need is the data which evince feeds into Ghostscript and the Ghostscript command line which is used. If I can reproduce the Ghostscript failure by calling Ghostscript directly on the command line I can report an upstream bug to alert the Ghostscript developers about a possible regression caused by the security update. The Ghostscript developers could also easily determine whether the output of current libspectre is valid input for Ghostscript, if you provide an appropriate file.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

This was fixed with today's ghostscript update. See bug 1647276.