Public bug reported:
Binary package hint: nautilus
Symptom: Immediate crash on attempt to open the Edit/Preferences dialog.
This occurred every time until the cause was found:
While digging through backtrace I noticed this:
#6 0xb7f05d5e in eel_preferences_get (name=0x87d6620
"preferences/default_folder_viewer") at eel-preferences.c:480
This corresponds to dummy error printed on console at time of crash:
assertion failed: (value->type == GCONF_VALUE_STRING)
Sure enough, /apps/nautilus/preferences/default_folder_viewer value was
set to an integer. Changed back to default type/value (String /
icon_view) in gconf-editor and problem disappeared.
So I suppose there are two questions here:
1.) How did it get set that way? (probably will never know..)
2.) Why is gconf (or perhaps libeel2) type handling not more robust?
Something so trivial ought not have the potential to be so catastrophic.
This problem was ridiculously hard to track down and the average user
would never be able to fix something like this, nor would an
intermediate user be able to find a solution by googling. (no bug-buddy,
no nautilus debug log was generated, and it could have been any gconf
value corrupted) Correct behavior should be to reset the bad value to
its default as a "graceful failure" mode, instead of just dying without
any (user apparent) explanation. Anyone know if upstream has considered
a better solution? note: I'm not a GNOME dev.. just switched from being
a long-time KDE user actually :)
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Fri Jul 11 22:29:44 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/nautilus
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: nautilus 1:2.22.3-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-19-386 i686
** Affects: nautilus (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
** Tags: apport-bug
--
Nautilus dies easily on bad gconf data (design flaw)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/247775
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