Re: Lenny users: attn about Gnome/libxml2 breakage

["Patrick Wiseman" <pwiseman@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Chris Burkhardt <chris@mretc.net> wrote:
> Christian Jaeger wrote:
>> Today I did the usual dist-upgrade for my "testing" install, and it
>> left me with a badly broken (from user's perspective) installation,
>> because basically all Gnome applications stopped working. After a bit
>> over 2 hours worth of investigation, I've found out how to solve the
>> issue; since I first looked here and didn't find anything gnome
>> related, I'm sending this to the list for the casual other victim.
>>
>> Symptom: Gnome apps just hang, without outputting anything to
>> stdout/stderr (or .xsession-errors if started through the menu).
>>
>> Problem: the apps segfault inside libxml2, and thereafter enter a
>> deadlocked state in a mutex (or in a select call); the former is
>> apparently a bug in libxml2, the latter seems to be the Gnome
>> functionality to pop up a windows which seems to have an issue on it's
>> own (so it's really two bugs happening here, obscuring the
>> investigation a bit.)
>>
>> Solution: install libxml2 from unstable; this is actually a downgrade
>> (from libxml2 2.6.32.dfsg-2+lenny to 2.6.32.dfsg-2). I.e. "apt-get
>> install -t unstable libxml2/unstable", but you need to have the
>> unstable sources in apt.sources and use apt pinning (I won't explain
>> that here, check other sources).
>
> Hi Christian, thanks for the warning and solution.

I second the thanks for the heads-up.  I hadn't yet done my daily
update, so I put libxml2 and libxml2-utils on hold until I can be sure
the new bug is fixed.

Patrick