Bug#1104456: Bug#1077962: libsoup-3.0-0: makes gnome-calculator hang during startup

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 serious
Control: tags -1 + bookworm pending
Control: block -1 by 1109147

On Thu, 10 Jul 2025 at 19:31:59 +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
>On Mon, 05 Aug 2024 at 06:45:18 +0000, Jace wrote:
>>gnome-calculator freezes when using a Debian system behind mullvadVPN due to a
>>bug in libsoup that was patched in version 3.4.3
>
>[The underlying bug is]
><https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libsoup/-/issues/361>, which was 
>apparently fixed by 
><https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libsoup/-/merge_requests/374>. The 
>original issue report and merge request talk about crashes, but these 
>are memory management/object lifetime issues that could equally well 
>cause a hang.

A fix for this libsoup3 issue has been approved by the stable release 
managers and should be included in the Debian 12.12 point release, which 
is planned for 6th September. The same issue was also already fixed in 
the Debian 13.0 stable release.

This is a libsoup3 bug, not a gnome-calculator bug (even though the 
symptom appears in gnome-calculator), so gnome-calculator will not be 
changed for this.

As noted in several of the many duplicate bug reports, a workaround is
to run this command

     gsettings set org.gnome.calculator refresh-interval 0

which turns off download of currency exchange rates.

Peter Mueller wrote:
>Whoever is responsible: shouldn't the bug reports be merged?

I am intentionally not merging the duplicate bug reports or reassigning 
them to libsoup3 at this stage, in the hope that this way, users of 
gnome-calculator will see at least one of the 10 different bug reports 
that refers to this issue, and not open an 11th.

     smcv