Bug#1088617: GNOME Files crash and Tracker3 issue in Debian 12.8 due to JSON Files

[P9jgW4773EY]

Package: shared-mime-info
Version: 2.2-1

Debian 12.8 is (still) suffering from a bug where the presence of .js or .json files in a directory is crashing GNOME Files (Nautilus) and rendering Tracker3 useless. The bug affects GNOME Files 'search' bar, resulting in constant segmentation faults and tracker-services getting stuck in start-stop loops.

Steps to reproduce the GNOME Files crash:

# Create a non-empty .json file
echo '{}' > test.json
# Open the directory in GNOME Files
nautilus .
# Watch GNOME Files crash

If the directory containing the .json file is being indexed by Tracker3, the tracker-miner-fs-3.service is constantly being killed with status=11/SEGV, resulting in a start-stop loop of the tracker-miner.

Steps to reproduce tracker-miner start-stop loop:

# Change to an indexed directory, e.g.
cd Documents/
# Create a non-empty .json file
echo '{}' > test.json
# Open real-time system logs
journalctl -f
# Watch tracker-miner suffer

Recommended Bug fix for Debian Stable 12.8:

It turns out multiple packages, including Tracker3 and Nautilus, depend on the libglib2.0-0 package, which itself recommends the package shared-mime-info that is installed by default on Debian 12. This package had a minor bug a year ago, where the sub-class type for JSON5 documents was defined incorrectly:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/-/merge_requests/275/diffs

The version 2.2-1 containing the bug is still the version currently used by Debian Stable 12.8, while the bug has been fixed in package version 2.4-5, which is already used by Debian Testing.

I was able to fix the bug on my system running Debian 12.8 by creating a simple private backport using the official guide (https://wiki.debian.org/SimpleBackportCreation) and thus installing shared-mime-info_2.4-5~bpo12+1_amd64.deb.
Since it is not obvious to the user that this package is indeed the culprit, I doubt many users will take the same approach.

The bug is affecting the basic usage of the desktop environment, therefore I suggest including a fix for the package in the upcoming update for Debian 12 Bookworm (Debian 12.9).

I am using Debian GNU/Linux 12.8 (Bookworm), kernel 6.1.0-28-amd64, and libc6 2.36-9+deb12u9.