[packagekit] Handling back end crashes in the UI

[Richard Hughes]

On 21 February 2011 11:58, Sergio Schvezov <sergiusens at ieee.org> wrote:
> Hi, I'm noticing that packagekitd sometimes crashes mid transaction
> (zypp back end, although should be only relevant to the crash and not
> my question ;-))

Ick, backends should never crash, especially if they are threaded and
part of the packagekitd process :-(

> So when it crashes mid transaction, what would be the best method to
> detect this in the UI? is there a DBUS signal I could be reading that
> would help me with this?

The best way to do this is for the backend to not crash!

If you're asking for a signal, it would be a heuristic at best, and
the best way would be to see if the org.freedesktop.org name
disappeared from the system bus. But this would be a band aid, the
user can't actually do anything useful knowing that something crashed
for an unspecified reason, and so a GUI element would be a really bad
idea.

Is there anything I can help with debugging the zypp backend crash?

Richard.