Bug#642750: epiphany-browser: *HIGHLY* unstable on ia64 (IA-64/IPF/Itanium) platform

[Stephan Schreiber]

I filed bug#697172 for yet another bug of webkit.
Furthermore, bug#697173 for a bug in the epiphany-browser package.
Furthermore, bug#697174 in order to enable seed on ia64.

I also realized that gnash seems to crash epiphany sometimes. I  
browsed through the Debian bug reports and found ones which blame  
gnash to make the webkit based browsers unstable - epiphany-bowser on  
Gnome and Konqueror on KDE:
bug#594822, 655839, 549309.
I removed both gnash and gnash-common from my computer and realized a  
real improvement of epiphany's behaviour.

But I still experienced some trouble, for example, a reproducable  
hang-up and a crash a few seconds subsequently: Enter www.kununu.de;  
enter a company name in the top right search edit box; enter; click on  
a company's name - hang-up, crash.
I tried Fedora 17 i386 on another box (epiphany-browser 3.4.3; webkit  
1.8.3; gnash isn't installed): same behaviour. It isn't an ia64  
specific bug.

I think epiphany-browser/webkit with all patches runs on ia64 as  
stable as on x86; this is the best we can do at the moment.


A summary of the patches we had so far:

webkit, this bug report
01-ia64-wide-ptr.patch
02-ia64-use-system-malloc.patch

webkit, bug#694971
large-mem-page.patch

webkit, bug#697172
thread-safe-icon-db.patch

seed, bug#582774
seed no longer FTBFS without any change

epiphany-browser, bug#697173
history-thread-startup-race.patch

epiphany-browser, bug#697174
enabling seed in debian/rules


If you want to test it, you can download the built debs:

http://www.fs-driver.org/debian-ia64/webkitgtk-debs-v3.tar
http://www.fs-driver.org/debian-ia64/seed-debs.tar
http://www.fs-driver.org/debian-ia64/epiphany-debs.tar

Remember to remove both gnash and gnash-common before you test it.

Stephan