(Fedora 13) Seamonkey 2.0.x constantly crashing

Mason mpeg.blue at free.fr
Wed Oct 6 09:04:24 UTC 2010


Hello everyone,

The Seamonkey 2.0.x package in Fedora 13 is unusable,
as it crashes randomly, sometimes within seconds.

This problem has been well-known for months.

Fedora bug report:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=602437

Mozilla bug report:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522635

As far as I understand...

In Linux, gecko (the layout engine) links to libcairo. When Mozilla
upgraded from libcairo 1.8.8 to libcairo 1.8.10, they found a bug in
gecko that made the app crash. This bug was fixed on the gecko 1.9.2
branch, but not on the 1.9.1 branch.

Seamonkey 2.0.x is based on gecko 1.9.1, and the package is built
to link to the system's libcairo, which is > 1.8.8 => CRASH

There are (at least) two solutions to this problem.

1. Several people have back-ported the gecko 1.9.2 fix to the 1.9.1
branch. Applying one of these patches would make Seamonkey 2.0.x work
with the system's libcairo. (Debian and Ubuntu have done that.)

2. Seamonkey provides its own private version of libcairo 1.8.8
Linking to that version of libcairo does not trigger the crash.
(This is how the official build is compiled, and in fact, linking
to the private libcairo is the recommended method.)
All it takes is --disable-system-cairo in the build script.

Both of these suggestions have been ignored by the package maintainer.

Having an app crash randomly and constantly is a very frustrating
experience.

Solution 2 is extremely trivial to implement.
What can I do to make it happen?

-- 
Regards.



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