Bug#800951: gnome-shell crashing when closing evince, without accessibility zoom

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 at 13:23:10 -0400, Benedikt Ahrens wrote:
> I am seeing gnome-shell crashing *sometimes* when closing an evince
> window. It does not happen every time I close evince. It only happens
> with evince windows, not with windows of other applications.
> I do not have accessibility zoom enabled.

It's probably best if you open a separate bug for this, preferably
using the reportbug tool to give us full version information. We have
an infinite number of bug numbers available, and merging two bugs if
they turn out to have the same root cause is much, much easier than
disentangling two separate root causes that were discussed on the same
bug number.

Bugs that aren't reliably reproducible are hard to fix, but if you
can get more information about the crash by looking at the system log
(systemd Journal or /var/log/syslog), that would be a useful step towards
figuring out what is going on. Please send that information to the new
bug report rather than in a reply to this mail.

Another useful thing you could do to give developers more information
would be to get a backtrace. If you're using the default systemd init
system, then the easiest way to do that is to install the systemd-coredump
and gdb packages, and continue to use your system as usual. When the crash
happens again, a crash dump will be stored, from which you can provide more
information about the crash that will help us to work out what is happening.
(There's more background about this on
https://wiki.debian.org/HowToGetABacktrace but for now, the important thing
is to install systemd-coredump - when you have collected a crash dump,
someone can talk you through how to get more information out of it.)

If you're not using systemd, the corekeeper package is an alternative to
systemd-coredump.

Thanks,
    smcv