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Thu, 22 Oct 2009

I have a Portal Document Format (PDF) file, which has a series of pages
that evince, the default Ubuntu (and Gnewsense) Gnome PDF reader crash on when they are opened to. Xpdf can read the pages just fine however.

This lead me to look over Ubuntu's launchpad web site, which I began browsing.

(I saw that file-roller, the default Ubuntu/Gnewsense Gnome archive file application was crashing with segmentation violations a lot. There was not much non-automatic information about this however, aside from some people saying the problem was not always reproducible, but only happened sometimes. Due to this, and due to it using a lot of heavy GTK/GDK stuff that I don't know, I moved on.)

I wanted to look at my evince crash a little more carefully, but I was still running Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) whereas most people were reporting the problem on Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) or even beta versions of Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10 - beta), the release version of which is supposed to be coming out in eleven days. Well, this indicates the problem has been around for a while, and is still around. So I upgraded to Jackalope. I was a little uneasy about whether to go to the Koala beta, but then I plunged in.

One thing I noticed, which was not around so much on Ubuntu's Hardy Heron (8.04), is apport, a window which pops up when an application crashes and says it will automatically report it to Ubuntu if people want. This popped up for me when evince crash and I sent in the bug. Later, I marked it as a duplicate of a similar one. Launchpad makes a slight effort to try to let you see if it's a duplicate while reporting, but that question can be a little complex, and the process doesn't deal with that. So I reported it, and then marked it as a duplicate later.

The Poppler PDF rendering library was partially implicated in the crash, so I downloaded the dpkg for ePDFView, which also uses that library. ePDFView also crashes on these pages. So I reported that as a bug to Ubuntu via apport. Stacktrace shows pretty much the same thing happening, they're both crashing in the JPEG 6.2 library, the call from which can be traced back, via the same route, to a Page::displaySlice call in the poppler library. So it looks like the poppler library (or possibly even the jpeg library) is at fault.

[/poppler] permanent link