info crashes (core dumped) when pressing ?

[Michael]

Binary package hint: info

open a terminal
type info
press the '?'
Now info crashes with a core dump

additional information
version info:
info (GNU texinfo) 4.8

uname -a
Linux droef.nl 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.13(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Thank you for your bug report.

Your version number given for info isn't the package number, which is what we require. Please obtain that from the output of "dpkg -s info".

I'm unable to reproduce the problem you describe; at any rate, we'll need a backtrace to proceed further. Please follow the instructions provided at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash .

[Michael (m-gruys)]

Package: info
Status: install ok installed
Priority: important
Section: doc
Installed-Size: 328
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Source: texinfo
Version: 4.8.dfsg.1-4build1
Replaces: texinfo (<< 4.7-2)
Provides: info-browser
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.5-0ubuntu1), libncurses5 (>= 5.4-5)
Conflicts: xemacs-support
Description: Standalone GNU Info documentation browser
 The Info file format is an easily-parsable representation for online
 documents. This program allows you to view Info documents, like the
 ones stored in /usr/share/info.
 .
 Much of the software in Debian comes with its online documentation in
 the form of Info files, so it is most likely you will want to install it.
Original-Maintainer: Norbert Preining <email address hidden>

[Michael (m-gruys)]

backtrace:

[Michael (m-gruys)]

I have also enabled my core dump.
The core dump file is attached

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Hi, thanks for that. However, the backtrace is not usable, as it didn't find debugging symbols for info. Did you apt-get install info-dbgsym before running gdb?

[Michael (m-gruys)]

O no... After checking I discovered that I had not installed it. Sorry.
So I have made another backtrace after installation of the mentioned package, which is hopefully now more useful.
The core dump which I prior made, is this also affected due installation of the info-dbgsym package?
In other words should I also produce another core dump file?

[Michael (m-gruys)]

Just in case, also a new core dump file.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

Thanks. Actually, the core files are only really useful for obtaining backtraces from :) ...I'll go ahead and remove them. The gdb backtrace this time looks much more helpful; hopefully we'll be able to track this problem down more easily. Thanks for doing that!

[Pedro Francisco (pedrogfrancisco)]

It also crashes here. I'm running Karmic, so if you want a new backtrace tell me.

Anyway, WORKAROUND: run

$ LC_ALL=C info

Both `?' and `h' will work fine now.

[Micah Cowan (micahcowan)]

The problem seems to occur only when a non-English locale is being used (might not be triggered by all locales). I can trigger the abort by running "LC_ALL=pt_BR.utf8 LANGUAGE=pt info" (with the Portuguese language packs installed).

The problem seems to be in command documentation strings like:

msgid "Internally used by \\[universal-argument]"
msgstr "Intern gebruikt door \\[universal-argument]"

Info absolutely expects that the text between the \\[...] refers to an actual function name, which it expects to be able to find and replace according to its needs. If it sees a "function name", but can't look that name up, then it aborts.

For instance, when I'm using pt_BR, I see that it gets translated to ""Ir para o próximo item correspondente do último `\\[pesquisa-índice]' comando". Notice that they translated the function name itself, too (bad idea). This is what's causing problems.

I'm not seeing function-name translation like this upstream, nor does upstream even appear to provide translations for Portuguese; so it looks like a ticket should be opened in the Translations section for this.