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clipman crashes noisily when I copy binary junk
Status:
CLOSED: FIXED
Product:
Xfce4-clipman-plugin
Component:
General

Comments

Description Chris Moore 2006-06-20 23:06:32 CEST
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060406 Firefox/1.5.0.4 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.4-1)
Build Identifier: 0.6-1

I copied some random binary junk into my clipboard using GNU Emacs.  The clipman plugin started using all my CPU and writing:

  (xfce4-clipman-plugin:22816): Gdk-WARNING **: Error converting selection from UTF8_STRING

over and over again into my session logfile.  After writing half a gigabyte of such lines I killed it, because my disk was about to run out of space.

There's no guarantee that the contents of the clipboard are going to be a valid UTF8 string, so if clipman isn't able to convert the string on its first attempt shouldn't it give up trying?

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
When it happened, I had used dd to write the first few sectors of a reiserfs disk partition to a file, then visited that file in GNU Emacs, and then deleted large parts of the file using Emacs.  I have x-select-enable-clipboard set to t in Emacs, so whenever I 'kill' regions of the buffer, they get sent to the clipboard.
Comment 1 Chris Moore 2006-06-20 23:09:37 CEST
I just counted them; clipman wrote the following string 4,943,074 times before I killed it.  That's too many error messages!  The file I was editing was only 512k bytes long, so this is more than one message per byte in the file.  I would guess clipman was in an infinite loop:

  "(xfce4-clipman-plugin:22816): Gdk-WARNING **: Error converting selection from UTF8_STRING"

Comment 2 Nick Schermer editbugs 2006-06-21 15:38:19 CEST
I've changed this code in svn, but i looks more like a glib problem. Maybe it's indeed better to drop the content of the clip if we can't make it utf8, I'll change this.

The problem is you can only use the latest svn version if you also have libxfcegui4 from trunk, so you probably have to wait for beta 2.
Comment 3 Nick Schermer editbugs 2006-06-21 19:02:48 CEST
I'm unable to repreduce this problem, but can you try the new version please? It should work with all the 4.4 versions.

http://www.foo-projects.org/~nick/plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin-0.6.5.tar.bz2
Comment 4 Chris Moore 2006-06-21 21:05:59 CEST
I tried that version but still get the same problem.

I made a 1-byte file containing just character 0300 (octal), copied that using Emacs, and clipman started printing it's error message over and over again.

I don't know how to run clipman so that I can see its output other than by running xfce4 inside a FreeNX session.  Is there another way, so that I can run FreeNX out of the equation?  ~/.xsession-errors has "...Too much output, ignoring rest..." at the end of it, so I can't watch that.  Is there some way of invoking clipman from the command line and getting it to run properly?
Comment 5 Chris Moore 2006-06-21 22:22:19 CEST
Here's a backtrace:

(gdb) where
#0  0x0804b7cf in clipman_check (clipman=0x80b6af0) at clipman.c:752
#1  0xa781efb6 in g_timeout_dispatch (source=0x80ba400, callback=0xa77e9f08 <in6addr_any+22688>, user_data=0x81f6dc0) at gmain.c:3292
#2  0xa781d1bc in IA__g_main_context_dispatch (context=0x807f370) at gmain.c:1916
#3  0xa782064b in g_main_context_iterate (context=0x807f370, block=1, dispatch=1, self=0x80971e8) at gmain.c:2547
#4  0xa78209a7 in IA__g_main_loop_run (loop=0x80b6998) at gmain.c:2751
#5  0xa7d644e1 in gtk_main () from /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
#6  0x0804b064 in main (argc=134795216, argv=0x1) at clipman.c:45

The error message is displayed each time clipman_check() calls gtk_clipboard_wait_for_text (defaultClip) - which it does regularly, using a timer.
Comment 6 Nick Schermer editbugs 2006-08-03 20:40:29 CEST
I can't do anything about this problem, is probably a gtk bug in gtk_clipboard_wait_for_text ().
Comment 7 Chris Moore 2006-08-03 22:05:25 CEST
OK, thanks for looking into it.

I've raised this bug in the GNOME tracker:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349856
Comment 8 Nick Schermer editbugs 2006-09-01 09:12:58 CEST
Well as read in the gnome bug tracker, this is not a clipman problem.
Comment 9 Chris Moore 2006-09-17 20:55:26 CEST
I reported this to the Emacs list, and it seems to be on the way to being fixed:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-09/msg00169.html

Bug #1945

Reported by:
Chris Moore
Reported on: 2006-06-20
Last modified on: 2012-04-09

People

Assignee:
Mike Massonnet
CC List:
0 users

Version

Version:
unspecified

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