Lenny users: attn about Gnome/libxml2 breakage

[Christian Jaeger]

Today I did the usual dist-upgrade for my "testing" install, and it left 
me with a badly broken (from user's perspective) installation, because 
basically all Gnome applications stopped working. After a bit over 2 
hours worth of investigation, I've found out how to solve the issue; 
since I first looked here and didn't find anything gnome related, I'm 
sending this to the list for the casual other victim.

Symptom: Gnome apps just hang, without outputting anything to 
stdout/stderr (or .xsession-errors if started through the menu).

Problem: the apps segfault inside libxml2, and thereafter enter a 
deadlocked state in a mutex (or in a select call); the former is 
apparently a bug in libxml2, the latter seems to be the Gnome 
functionality to pop up a windows which seems to have an issue on it's 
own (so it's really two bugs happening here, obscuring the investigation 
a bit.)

Solution: install libxml2 from unstable; this is actually a downgrade 
(from libxml2 2.6.32.dfsg-2+lenny to 2.6.32.dfsg-2). I.e. "apt-get 
install -t unstable libxml2/unstable", but you need to have the unstable 
sources in apt.sources and use apt pinning (I won't explain that here, 
check other sources).

Cheers,
Christian.


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