Bug#688094: libatspi2.0-0: at-spi2 leaves a lot of sockets behind

[Francois Gouget <fgouget@free.fr>]

Package: libatspi2.0-0
Version: 2.5.3-1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

A look in my ~/.cache directory shows a lot of at-spi2 sockets:

$ ls ~/.cache/at-spi2*/* | wc -l
35057

And lsof shows that only 80 are currently in use which means that over 34900 are stale socket files that should have been deleted at some point. Find shows pretty strange results though:

$ find $HOME/.cache -name socket -mmin -1440 | grep at-spi2 | wc -l
17352
$ find $HOME/.cache -name socket -mmin +1440 -mmin -2880 | grep at-spi2 | wc -l
17272
$ find $HOME/.cache -name socket -mmin +2880 | grep at-spi2 | wc -l
864

$ find $HOME/.cache -name socket -mmin +200 | grep at-spi2 | wc -l
33091

So a lot of these files are pretty recent but almost all date back to before I loggged out+in this morning.

I also noticed a suspicious number of at-spi2 socket files in /var/lib/gdm3/.cache:

$ ls /var/lib/gdm3/.cache/at-spi2*/* | wc -l
35

Of these lsof shows that none are in use but 5 date back to when I logged out+in this morning.

Notes:
* I activated at-spi2 because I was developping an application making use of it but I have not actively used it in the past month. I guess a workaround would be to uninstall/deactivate it but a fix would be better.
* The last reboot dates back to 1 day and 23 hours ago. A lot of these are older.

It seems that each socket is created by libatspi2 when it gets loaded by an application like firefox, gnome-terminal, nautilus, etc. So if the process crashes the socket may be left behind, and it's probably hard for at-spi2 to know which are still in use and which are not. However I doubt that I that I had over 34000 process crashes. Also it's not acceptable to require the user to manually clean up the mess even in the case of a process crash.

This is probably related to:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/commits-list/2012-July/msg00944.html

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages libatspi2.0-0 depends on:
ii  libc6              2.13-35
ii  libdbus-1-3        1.6.0-1
ii  libglib2.0-0       2.32.3-1
ii  libx11-6           2:1.5.0-1
ii  multiarch-support  2.13-35

Versions of packages libatspi2.0-0 recommends:
ii  at-spi2-core  2.5.3-1

libatspi2.0-0 suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information