GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 90983
Corrupt .server file brings down bonobo completely
Last modified: 2018-06-16 13:44:32 UTC
I dug myself a bit into Bonobo programming, made a component, wrote a .server. In that .server, I accidentally typed "oaf server" instead of "oaf_server". After inserting that .server, my application was unable to create the component. It was also unable to create any other component, and, much worse, any other application was unable to create any component, breaking the *running* Gnome desktop. With that corrupt .server installed, not even the panel would come up when starting Gnome. The bonobo activation should really be more tolerant, i.e. ignore corrupt files instead of choking on them. When third parties start developing for Gnome, a user would be in total surprise if he installs some broken crackpot application, and finds his complete desktop defunct.
Given that it screwed you the developer, rather than screwing the user - I don't much mind I must say. If you as a distributor ship a package that you know breaks the entire system - then you're not going to have customers that long ;-) If you want - create a patch to fix it. We really need a better way to get warnings out of the server - perhaps syslogging them conditionally or somesuch.
ok - so this just bit me ;-) we clearly need more output here - syslogging it would be best - but certainly not assert failing when something goes wrong. Any chance of a patch ? shouldn't be that tough ...
It also dies misteriously on a dangling server file symlink. Took me quite a while to figure that was the problem....:(
It'd be _really_ good if we could open a connection to syslog, and log errors and messages there - much like gconf does. It should be a pretty easy port; if we can make that happen, I'm happy for it to continue to work on this sort of error. How does that sound ?
*** Bug 108285 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 105958 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
So - we're just waiting for a patch for this;
Hm... I see syslog messages from bonobo-activation-server already. But I also see some g_warnings in debug mode. Is this bug still pertinent, or do we still need to convert the g_warnings to syslog messages?
as long as there is some warning in syslog about a bad .server file & which file it is we can close this out :-)
https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/bonobo/ has been archived in Git. It is not under active development anymore and it is unlikely that there will be any further active development. Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality (see bug 790929). Please feel free to reopen this bug report in the future if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.