Bug#524600: update-manager: Crashes after failing to read configuration

[Stephan Peijnik]

Hi Olaf,

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 15:00 +0200, Olaf Mandel wrote:
> One thing that is new: I now get a dialog box informing me of the crash,
> but independent of which button I click in the box, the program cannot
> be run. And again: the problem only occurs for "su -c" and "gksu". It
> does not occur for sudo. Anything else I should try?

"gksu -k" should work properly, just like sudo. "su -c" is not
supported, as the bug reporting tool cannot detect the original user
(ie. before su was called).

The problem with the bug reporting tool is, as I said, that it needs to
be able to detect the original user. Running update-manager via "gksu
-k" preserves the USERNAME environment variable and sudo preserves the
original user in SUDO_USER/SUDO_UID.
So the problem with bug reporting isn't really a bug, but rather a
feature, making sure reportbug is not being run as root.

Right now I am thinking about a solution to this one. The
update-notifier problem should be rather easy to fix, whilst manual
invocation is unlikely to be fixable right now.

update-notifier however, is going to get a major update, but I do not
have an ETA for that yet. I am thinking about fixing this issue in the
current update-notifier with a patch, whilst the new one is in the
works.

-- Stephan