Re: Icecat crash

[Leo Famulari]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 11:12:45PM +0100, Julien Lepiller wrote:
> Hey, I'm also experiencing crashes with icecat since a few months. It
> just seems to happen randomly. I've found a note about that on the LFS
> website on the firefox page that says that using system cairo is
> causing a crash when it tries to do background rendering. So I've
> changed our icecat recipe to use the bundled version of cairo, and I
> don't get any crash anymore. Would something like this patch be
> acceptable?

For serious upstream vendors like Mozilla, one of the reasons they
bundle things is that they are hitting bugs in the 3rd party library
that are not fixed upstream.

On the other hand, distros like to unbundle because the upstream vendor
tends not to patch security vulnerabilities in their bundled copies
quickly enough, in our opinion.

So, if we want to use the bundled cairo, we need to understand what
upstream version of cairo it is based on, and if it contains any
unpatched security vulnerabilities.

Of course, denial-of-service is a security issue, and our IceCat is
currently suffering from it due to this cairo crash.

Another option is figure out how to build our IceCat using the skia
rendering backend [0] instead of cairo, which is the work-around that we
have been recommending to users. Asking users to change this option
themselves is not a good solution, in my opinion.

WDYT?

[0]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1038800
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740200#c44

> From 89a121bab987caef7f0fbe0f5e24085c3ccae42d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Julien Lepiller <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2017 20:59:15 +0100
> Subject: [PATCH] gnu: icecat: Fix random crashes.
> 
> gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm (icecat): Remove cairo dependency to fix crashes.
> ---
>  gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm | 5 ++---
>  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm b/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
> index 9279c46b5..90655fd76 100644
> --- a/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
> +++ b/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
> @@ -404,6 +404,8 @@ standards.")
>                        ;; 
> <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=847568>
>                        ;;
>                        ;; TODO: Use system graphite2.
> +                      ;; TODO: Use system cairo. This currently causes random
> +                      ;; crash when icecat does background rendering.
>                        ;;
>                        "modules/freetype2"
>                        "modules/zlib"
> @@ -412,7 +414,6 @@ standards.")
>                        "media/libjpeg"
>                        "media/libvpx"
>                        "security/nss"
> -                      "gfx/cairo"
>                        "js/src/ctypes/libffi"
>                        "db/sqlite3"))
>            ;; Delete .pyc files, typically present in icecat source tarballs
> @@ -426,7 +427,6 @@ standards.")
>      (inputs
>       `(("alsa-lib" ,alsa-lib)
>         ("bzip2" ,bzip2)
> -       ("cairo" ,cairo)
>         ("cups" ,cups)
>         ("dbus-glib" ,dbus-glib)
>         ("gdk-pixbuf" ,gdk-pixbuf)
> @@ -511,7 +511,6 @@ standards.")
>                             "--with-system-nspr"
>                             "--with-system-nss"
>                             "--enable-system-pixman"
> -                           "--enable-system-cairo"
>                             "--enable-system-ffi"
>                             "--enable-system-hunspell"
>                             "--enable-system-sqlite"
> -- 
> 2.11.1
>

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