Bug#1021043: linphone-desktop: linphone crashes and is unusable

[Dennis Filder]

Control: tags -1 + confirmed
X-Debbugs-Cc: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg at fifthhorseman.net>

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 06:56:04PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> I've used linphone for years.  Recently (i think with the upgrade to
> 4.3.2-2) it no longer works for me, crashing with a range of errors.

It would help a lot to know the exact time when those crashes started.
Can you try narrowing it down, e.g. by looking at the ctime of
files/directories you created in reaction to the crashes?  I also saw
one segfault that was not handled by __GI_abort() -- maybe you had
one, too, so it might show up as a message in /var/log/message*
somewhere.  Also, do you have the impression that the crashes suddenly
became more frequent somehow?  If so: When?  What is the output of?:

    stat /usr/share/doc/linphone-desktop/changelog.Debian.gz

> Working with my longstanding configuration, i see the following on stderr:
>
> [...]
>
> Please let me know if you'd like me to supply any additional debugging information.

I could reproduce all of those messages and stack traces with varying
frequencies except the first one.  Can you try if downgrading
libsoci-core4.0 and libsoci-sqlite3-4.0 to 4.0.1-5 from bullseye stops
the crashes or at least makes them less frequent for you?  I have not
been able to reproduce any crashes with those versions, neither with a
fresh profile nor with my own.  soci had an upgrade to 4.0.3-1 which
entered unstable on 2022-09-25 and testing on 2022-09-27.  If you are
certain that you observed crashes before those dates the cause might
lie elsewhere, or there might be multiple issues at play.

My current suspicion is that soci 4.0.3-1 had an ABI break from
upstream commit 1b1b5621f5abc40bd76a54a779455e8b9c0892ff (adding the
private backendRef_ member changed the layouts of the classes
soci::connection_parameters and soci::session and liblinphone.so.10
instantiates the latter).

Regards.