2.6.3 from GetDeb crashing on Ubuntu 14.04

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 4:25 PM, Ronal Morse <ron at morsehouse.com> wrote:

>
> On 05/01/2014 12:46 PM, Tommy Trussell wrote:
>
>  On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 11:31 AM, Ronal Morse <ron at morsehouse.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 05/01/2014 09:35 AM, Colin Law wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Personally I think it is easier just to build from source yourself.
>>>
>>> Colin
>>>
>>
>>  Normally, Colin, I'd agree with you, but this particular box isn't set
>> up with all the build tools required to do that, and I'd wager most of the
>> Ubuntu users on this list aren't set up to do builds from source, either.
>>  That doesn't mean they shouldn't be, and I'm going to fix this one as soon
>> as I get the round tuit, but in the meantime I'm hopeful about just pulling
>> over the two files from the Utopic repository will address the problem at
>> hand.
>>
>> RBM
>
>
>  At this moment Utopic and Trusty are largely similar, so using its
> packages may work for now. HOWEVER I believe the risk is when any of the
> libraries GnuCash depends upon get updated in Utopic, the compiled package
> may then no longer work in Trusty, or it may fail in an unpredictable way.
>
>  JamesTk suggested (a few messages earlier in this discussion) that
> Ubuntu provides a process for updating buggy packages, The only process I
> know of is Backports. See this article about repositories:
>
>  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Ubuntu
>
>  and this article about backports:
>
>  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
>
>  The end of that second article links to the backport procedure. Anyone
> can request a package be backported. Note, however, that the requester
> should follow the package's progress through the backport process and that
> person and some others must test it, or it won't get approved.
>
>  Once the package gets into the backports repository, all someone need do
> to install it is activate the backports repository on their machine and
> that version will appear as an update in update-manager.
>
>   Yes, that certainly could be a problem in the future. I probably should
> not have mentioned in my original post the part about unmet dependencies.
> Or, better yet, should have warned that if one sees a call out for an unmet
> dependency to stop and not proceed further because of the potential for
> introducing incompatibilities with other applications.
>
> I think I gave Colin a bit of a short shrift earlier today. It seems the
> "build-dep" command works well for bringing in all the packages required to
> build Gnucash from source on Trusty (14.4).  That, coupled with the
> concerns you raise, makes it a better way to get relief and brings a
> solution to the table in less time than waiting for the backports process
> to...ah...process.  Or, is that backport?
>
>
Sorry to reopen this 12-day-old thread, but I just saw an update to a
package come through on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system, and I followed its bug
reports and realized there IS an additional way to get an update into
Ubuntu's regular repositories -- via SRUs or "Stable Release Updates,"
which "will, in general, only be issued in order to fix high-impact bugs."

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates

I believe GnuCash 2.6.1 might qualify for SRU treatment in Ubuntu 14.04 due
to several serious bugs. HOWEVER the process is not simple, and I have not
identified a particular "show stopper" that would make a concise SRU.

I thought I might volunteer to start the process to open a SRU request,
although I probably don't have quite the technical expertise I might need,
so I would gladly defer to someone else with more experience. (And a better
test environment than my "production" machine.)

I looked at the lists of bugs closed in 2.6.2 and 2.6.3 on the
http://gnucash.org/ home page seeking a simple test case (such as a crash,
data corruption, or serious visual anomaly).

The ones I have identified are
 o Bug #724753: Saved Multicolumn Report Error
 o Bug #724995: Gnucash crashes due to assertion failed when opening sqlite
file.
 o the crash in Bug #711567: Cannot save a custom report if a path contains
diacritic chars. (The 2.6.3 announcement says the crash has been fixed
though the bug has not.)

I also see a bug in Ubuntu's Launchpad specifically complaining about a
known problem in GnuCash 2.6.1 that the reporter thinks has been fixed in
2.6.3:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnucash/+bug/1310650

Unfortunately if you follow the link to Bugzilla, the comments say the bug
still exists in Ubuntu's 2.6.3 package but not in the source.

Can anyone suggest a straightforward test case a SRU might include? A
sample file that demonstrates the bug or a simple procedure that
demonstrates the fixed issue would be best.

If this would be better discussed on the gnucash-devel list I am subscribed
to both.