[packagekit] Handling back end crashes in the UI

[Sergio Schvezov]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 9:26 AM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 :-(

Yeah, that would be the ideal scenario :-)

>> 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?

Well I'm not familiar with the code or anything but it seems to be
crashing when the baseurl in the repo.d points to a non existing
location or gpg key checking is enabled but the appropriate key is not
present.

I'm noticing this particular zypp backend/packagekitd problem running
on MeeGo 1.1 and the 1.1.90 branch.
I'm guessing that whatever whacko message I send to PackageKit from
the DBUS side shouldn't cause the crash on packagekitd... in any case,
my ui should crash due to improper message handling :-)

I'll configure packagekitd to log out everything and see if it spits
out anything useful on my side.