Bug#415600: xchat-gnome fails to start

[Jonathan Guthrie]

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 13:52 +0200, Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 19:53 -0500, Jonathan Guthrie wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 18, 2007 at 12:04:17AM +0200, Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> > > 
> > > If this still is a problem, can you try version 0.16 from the
> > > experimental archive?
> > > http://packages.debian.org/experimental/gnome/xchat-gnome
> > 
> > First off, I have to make a confession.  I didn't actually think that
> > this was a problem with xchat-gnome.  Well, no program should crash
> > without leaving sufficient diagnostics to fix whatever the problem is,
> > but that's a minor thing if it's crashing due to some vital component
> > that was expected to be there, but which actually wasn't.  I was hoping
> > that you knew of a problem with whatever the real problem was and would
> > forward the issue to the place it should actually go because I had no
> > idea where that was and I felt strongly that I should report the problem
> > to somebody or it would get lost in the shuffle.
> > 
> > After much hair-tearing and unpleasantness, I discovered that the issue
> > actually is in the dbus system, which is sometimes failing to start at
> > boot time for whatever reason.  Fortunately, boot time stuff doesn't
> > need to happen very often on this system.
> 
> You should probably file a separate bug about this for the dbus
> package. 

Yes, I probably should, and if I could characterize the problem better,
I would have already.  Unfortunately, I don't really know what it's
doing and since I have a work-around, the incentive just isn't there.
I'll try to get to that soon, though.  I went looking at dbus defects
today and didn't see any that looked like what I'm seeing.  I think
maybe it's being screwed up by my use of LDAP for account information.
I'll have to verify that the configuration on this computer matches the
configurations on the other computers.

> > I haven't duplicated the issue in a while.  Not since I figured out how
> > to prevent xchat from crashing.  If you'd like, I can set up what I
> > believe the conditions are and see if it crashes again so that we can
> > test with the new version.  It's up to you and how much importance you
> > give to the problem.  I'm willing to put a couple of days into it, if
> > that's what you need, not that I think it will take that long.

> I made a quick attempt with xchat-gnome 0.16, trying to start it with
> dbus disabled, and I haven't been able to reproduce your problem. I
> would certainly appreciate it if you could give it a shot with 0.16. 

Okay, there have been some recent updates to dbus (with the release of
etch, a lot of bottled-up updates have been coming downstream) but it
still doesn't start properly on this computer at boot, and xchat 0.13
still crashes if I don't have dbus running, so this is a valid test.  I
have the experimental repository in my /etc/apt/sources file, so I can
easily install the new one.

Okay, 0.16 still crashes under the same conditions that 0.13 crashes
under.  Okay.  If I re-run /etc/init.d/dbus, I can start xchat 0.16.  I
now kill the "/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --system" task and xchat-gnome dies
in a similar fashion.  I don't know what the difference between my
computer and yours is, but it definitely still doesn't work here.
-- 
Jonathan Guthrie <jguthrie at brokersys.com>
Sto Pro Veritate