YACReader crash on start (manjaro/arch)

Hi,

as of a few days ago, when I start yacreader, I get the spinning cursor for a bit then nothing happens. Starting from a terminal yields the following:


(YACReader:19952): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 23:47:51.609: _gtk_style_provider_private_get_settings: assertion 'GTK_IS_STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIVATE (provider)' failed

(YACReader:19952): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 23:47:51.609: _gtk_style_provider_private_get_settings: assertion 'GTK_IS_STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIVATE (provider)' failed

(YACReader:19952): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 23:47:51.609: _gtk_style_provider_private_get_settings: assertion 'GTK_IS_STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIVATE (provider)' failed
zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) YACReader

It seems to have to do with GTK but I have no idea why. Any advice please?

Hmm hard to say. Since this is a segfault, the best thing would be if you run it with gdb and do a backtrace to get an idea why it is crashing.

If this happened after an update of the icu library, there is also a possibility that the crash comes from libpdfium-nojs dependency and you need to rebuild that package to fix it.

Thanks. I did notice that libpdfium-nojs was updated last month which may have something to do with the crash. I removed it and built the previous version from source, then built yacreader without libpdfium-nojs (removed it from PKGBUIL) so it compiled with the existing previous version. Unfortunately, it made no difference.

The next step is to run the debugger but its a little over my skill level (I'm basically a competent amateur). If you have any advise it would be welcome.

Otherwise, this could be one more thing to push me away from manjaro's rolling release model into ubuntu or something similar.

Getting a backtrace is fairly easy. From your shell, start YACReader like this:

$gdb YACReader

This loads it into the debugger. Next you run the program by typing "r", then "enter". Then you wait for the crash. Once the crash has happened, you will be dropped back to the gdb. Type "bt", then "enter" to get the backtrace and post it here. Once you have finished, you can exit the debugger with "q".

In the case of libpdfium-nojs you don't need to install a previous version of the package but you need to rebuild the package against updated dependencies. For this you will need to run makepkg with the -f option to force a rebuild if you already have a current version installed.

As I wrote in the AUR comment section: "
Important: This package depends on libicuuc and needs to be rebuild if the icu package is updated on your system!"

OK, output of gdb:

Starting program: /usr/bin/YACReader
/usr/bin/YACReader: error while loading shared libraries: libpdfium.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[Inferior 1 (process 9447) exited with code 0177]

Thanks for the advice. I'll try that next.

OK, I tried it, no difference. Same segfault. I don't understand it. Maybe I missed something. If I build yacreader with makepkg -f will it force rebuilding all the dependencies from scratch? Is that worth trying?

Is there anything else I can try? Is it possible I did it wrong?

I built libpdfium-nojs with the -f flag and it seemed to be re-downloading the source of all its dependencies, but when I built yacreader I still get the same crash.

OK, I give up. I tried everything including compiling yacreader with popler as pdf backend instead of pdfium - I still got the segfault.

I am not experienced in programming, it's been 20 years since I wrote code at college, so I'm not the right person to debug this. I wonder if other Arch users have the same problem.

Anyway for now I'll use something else. Hopefully at some point you'll release a packaged version like a flatpak.

AFAIK it generally works on Arch and Manjaro too. I'm the AUR maintainer, so I'd probably know if it was fundamentally broken.

I am not sure what is the possible cause for your problems at this point. There is one more thing we could try - doing a debug build and running it in gdb to get a proper backtrace.

You will need to modify two things for this:

1. in the PKGBUILD, you need to add "debug" to the CONFIG value (CONFIG+="pdfium debug")
2. you need to disable symbol stripping in the PKGBUILD. To do so, you need to add "options=('!strip')" to the PKGBUILD

You might need to clear the build directories of YACReader. This can be done by using makepkg with the -C option.

When you load the resulting binary in gdb, it should show you something along the lines of "Reading symbols from YACReader". If it says "no symbols found", something went wrong during the build.

Run the binary with debug symbols in gdb, get the backtrace and post the result here.

Sorry if this is a little complicated. I can't replicate the problem on my machine, so this is the only way I can investigate it.

Thank you very much for coming back to me. I will try this next and report back (probably in a day or so - work schedule a bit heavy atm).

Please note that I did not imply the application is broken - its broken on my system for reasons I can't fathom.