GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 557154
Allow totem to run without write-access to home directory
Last modified: 2008-10-21 05:32:39 UTC
Please describe the problem: I would like to be able to run totem and totem-video-thumbnailer without write access to the user's home directory (or without even having a home directory), for security reasons. The apps are launched via automated processes and running as an un-privileged (or, under-privileged) user. I noticed that after upgrading from gstreamer 0.10.20 to gstreamer 0.10.21, totem-video-thumbnailer did not function without write access to its home directory, presumably to write to ~/.gnome2 or ~/.gstreamer-0.10 directory. After creating a home directory and giving the user write access, totem-video-thumbnailer functioned as expected. Steps to reproduce: 1. Attempt to use totem-video-thumbnailer to create a thumbnail as a user with a nonexistent home directory. Actual results: No thumbnail is created. Expected results: If you create a writable home directory, totem-video-thumbnailer now creates a thumbnail. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: I am not sure if this bug is in gstreamer or totem. Also I only tested on the released versions of gnome and gstreamer specified.
This is fixed in CVS by this commit: 2008-10-08 Sebastian Dröge <sebastian.droege@collabora.co.uk> * gst/gstregistrybinary.c: (gst_registry_binary_write_cache): If we can't get a cache file don't try to save something to it. Dereferencing NULL pointers usually isn't a good idea.