GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 578943
Apps that fail to launch trough a .desktop file (due to a missing lib for ex) just fail silently
Last modified: 2010-07-07 12:53:20 UTC
+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #578917 +++ If you install an app that's missing some lib, segmentation faults, clashes with SELinux etc. and launch it from the desktop or panel the app will just silently fail. You wont know if it's just taking long to start or if it has crashed and for what reason. To actually see that you have to launch the app from a terminal and look at the output. I think gnome should display an error message when an app fails to launch with the output from the app. Something like: "Application X failed to launch. This is the output from the application: /usr/bin/someapp: error while loading shared libraries: somelib.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" The output might be confusing for a novice user so perhaps it could be hidden behind a button "Click here for more information" or something, but the important thing is that an error message is displayed so that the app isn't just silently failing leaving the user to wonder what has happened.
Not sure how nautilus could spot that an external application has failed during load. We can't check for exit code != 0 as that theoretically could be a valid end of program as well. Any ideas?
Exit code != 0 *means* an error. Funky utilities that return nonzero exit codes are just intended for scripting.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 91362 ***