gnubg on ubuntu 11.10 crashes during viewing the analysis

[Martin Abendroth]

After finishing a game -> analyze match or session -> one can read the
records but than the mouse isn't useable anymore within gnubg, one can
still switch around using the <tab> key. But it's not possible to close
the program regularly.

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[Michael Petch]

On 07/02/2012 11:58 AM, Martin Abendroth wrote:
> After finishing a game -> analyze match or session -> one can read the
> records but than the mouse isn't useable anymore within gnubg, one can
> still switch around using the <tab> key. But it's not possible to close
> the program regularly.
>

This has confirmed recently, and seem to be specific to newer versions
of Ubuntu and its libraries. The root cause hasn't been determined. I do
know that the keyboard continues to function (as you noted Tab still
works). It is mouse input (clicking) that doesn't function. I noticed
that you can get the mouse to start working again if you tab so the
highlight appears around the box (above the move list) that says what
game you are looking at (ie "Game 1: 0,0" ). Once that box is
highlighted you can hit the space bar and then enter. For me this gets
the mouse going again without killing the application.

The bug is very reproducible. At any point if you click on a position
that has been previously analyzed in the move list, this will cause the
mouse to stop responding.

The bug is in bug tracker as: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34864

--
Michael Petch
CApp::Sysware Consulting Ltd.
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304

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[Philippe Michel-3]

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Michael Petch wrote:

> The bug is very reproducible. At any point if you click on a position
> that has been previously analyzed in the move list, this will cause the
> mouse to stop responding.

Running gnubg with the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS environment variable set to true
seems to help.

Googling for this finds many reports of "Ubuntu broke my application" but
what's strange is that many are rather old and relate to Ubuntu releases
where gnubg runs fine.

I didn't found anything obvious about fixing that in the application
(although I don't know much about GUI programming and may not recognize
relevant information if I saw it). Still it seems likely that something
that used to work, and still does on other platforms, is not coded
defensively enough for recent Ubuntu releases.


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[Michael Petch]

On 07/02/2012 2:01 PM, Philippe Michel wrote:

> Running gnubg with the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS environment variable set to true
> seems to help.
>

I tried this when I first saw the bug as well. If you try this you end
up with other strange things happening. For me it usually ends up with
the move list pane disappearing altogether and then segfaults when I try
to do other things OR not being able to continue play properly.

> Googling for this finds many reports of "Ubuntu broke my application" but
> what's strange is that many are rather old and relate to Ubuntu releases
> where gnubg runs fine.
>

When I first saw this bug I thought that we had some "gtkfreeze/thaw"
issues, but I looked into that and it seemed fine (Put debug output code
in, and breakpoints where these occur). I was also concerned that we
might have been calling GTK GUI calls from outside the main GTK thread
(If you do this you have to be careful and calls some functions before
hand to get things in the proper state). Again that doesn't seem to be
the case.

> I didn't found anything obvious about fixing that in the application
> (although I don't know much about GUI programming and may not recognize
> relevant information if I saw it). Still it seems likely that something
> that used to work, and still does on other platforms, is not coded
> defensively enough for recent Ubuntu releases.
>

My guess is that it is a combination of our use of GTK and interactions
with the Ubuntu desktop window managers. We might have a bug
(memory/buffer overrun?) as well that only manifests itself in this
environment. As well, not sure you have noticed how badly our
application runs on Unity with GNUBG using individual panes for output.

The one thing I did not try though and would be next on my list. Debug
with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 and find out why the move pane doesn't display
properly (literally disappears for me) when you click on a move that has
been previously analysed. It may be that the cause of that might be
related to the mouse issue ( but manifesting itself differently) - seems
this scenario might be easier to track down.

--
Michael Petch
CApp::Sysware Consulting Ltd.
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304

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