HAL Crasher

[Danny Kukawka]

On Donnerstag, 15. März 2007, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> Le jeudi 15 mars 2007 à 00:11 +0000, Richard Hughes a écrit :
> > On Thu, 2007-03-15 at 00:06 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> > > HAL really shouldn't crash. I've got no time to debug this now. Release
> > > blocker?
> 
> Well, it is a "known" issue we discovered at Mandriva last week while
> pushing the last bits of HAL / pm-utils for 2007.1 :
> 
> Basically, any hald script outputting something on stderr will cause
> hald to abort.

IMO this happen only if you compile D-Bus with asserts (IIRC). But there would 
be some possible solutions to fix this in D-Bus:

1) if D-Bus get a output from stderr and the first line does not start
with a valid error name (org.freedesktop.Hal.*) D-Bus set the error name/type
automatically to org.freedesktop.*.unknown. and don't crash HAL.

2) D-Bus should get errors not via stderr, but via e.g. a special pipe 
(e.g. echo "Access type not supported" >&3) so that all scripts which would
like to send a D-Bus error have to use this pipe and not stderr. This would
IMO solve the source of the problem and would avoid to change all possible
scripts.

But I'm not sure if one of both would be accepted by the dbus developers/
maintainer. But the current behavior is unacceptable.

Danny