Bug#694340: libgconf2-4: libgconf built with the dbus backend requires dbus-glib to be initialized with threading

[Chow Loong Jin]

On 26/11/2012 05:50, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> severity 694340 serious
> thanks
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Le lundi 26 novembre 2012 à 01:36 +0800, Chow Loong Jin a écrit :
>>
>> +  /* Initialize DBus Glib for multithreading -- this fixes race conditions when
>> +     multi-threaded applications use gconf. Additionally, although the API
>> +     documentation says that dbus_g_thread_init() may only be called once, it is
>> +     actually really a wrapper for dbus_threads_init_default() which can be
>> +     called as many times as necessary. */ 
> 
> Thanks for the patch, but I’m not fond of violating the API just because
> it works for the moment. This is precisely the kind of code that can
> trigger later the kind of bug you are trying to fix.
> 
> OTOH the risk is low, since dbus-glib is a dying library.
> 
> Maybe we should just port GConf to GDBus instead, which doesn’t have
> this issue, but this is not a small change.

That was mentioned in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=683830, but
given that it isn't a small change, it's probably not going to happen for
Wheezy. Can we slap a downstream patch in the meantime? This bug causes Banshee
to crash pretty reliably.

I recall some other C# applications being affected as well, and forcing all of
them to add a dependency on dbus-glib to call dbus_g_thread_init seems wrong,
especially when dbus usage is supposed to be an implementation detail in
libgconf, and C# programs in general use DBus# which is a complete
reimplementation of libdbus.

-- 
Kind regards,
Loong Jin

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